Implementing the Paperless Office with FossLook in 5 Simple Steps

Why you need to do this right now

The first question you may ask yourself is "why should I even bother about this?". Everything works for me with good-old ink and paper, giant filing cabinets and storage vaults. I don't want any extra work when I don't need to! "What are the benefits of doing this?" You'll probably end up finding tons of excuses not to do this, but...

Let's look at this from another angle. Have you considered costs for mailing, shipping and storing paper? How hard it is to quickly find a document that you need right now? Not to mention the environmental impact of paper production and its negative effects. That definitely sounds less attractive. So, what can we do now?

Here are five simple steps to make your office paperless in less than an hour.

STEP 1: Install FossLook platform

Go to our Download page and install free version of FossLook. We're not going to go into too much detail on installation process here, you can refer to detailed installation instructions on our How to install page. Free version has all the functionality that we'll need.

STEP 2: Create a department structure

Once you've installed FossLook, the next step is to actually create a virtual structure of your organization. The goal here is to create a virtual representation of your enterprise. Note that you can create a sub-departments in any given department.

Run FossLook Administrator from the Windows "Start" menu, then select "Departments" tab, click "Add department", fill in department's name and you're ready to move on.

The result should look something like this:

STEP 3: Create users in departments

Now that we have our departments in place, let's focus on creating users in our system. It certainly is not a quick process, but you can create only 3 users for now, just to see how the system actually works, and complete the rest later.

In FossLook Administrator navigate to the "Users" tab, click "Add user", you'll see the typical window full of tabs, but don't worry, they are not all required. You'll only need to fill in user name, password, his/her department and that's all.

These actions should lead you to this result:

STEP 4: Create libraries with documents

Now, you need to create a document libraries - a virtual representation of file cabinets, and construct some documents to store them in these libraries.

In Administrator scroll down the window and find the "Documents library" tab. Now, click the "Create" button, a library screen will appear. Fill in the name of you library and click "Save". Ok, so now we got to the most important part of the whole endeavor - creating virtual documents!

In the library window find the "Document type" section and click the "Create" button. You'll see a new document window. Again, we have a more detailed description of everything that this window contains in one of the articles on our site, for now, just simply enter a document name and select a couple of functions in the section below. Finally, save the document.

You should end up with something like this:

STEP 5: Share your documents between users

Once you have successfully created everything up to this point, there is one small thing to do - share your documents between users. Select your document library, click the "Access" tab, from the drop-down list select users that you want to share this document with. Click "Save" and that's all! You've successfully implemented a paperless office solution.

Now you can log in to the system as users which you've created earlier and work with your documents. That's it, it's really that easy. An absolute no-brainer in my opinion.

The benefits of going paperless

Here are some of the benefits that you may experience by implementing a paperless office in your organization:

Improved search

Your documents are easy accessible from anywhere

Smart backup and recovery

Better collaboration possibilities

Strong security

Reduced storage costs

Environmentally friendly

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