Powerful content management and workflow software

It's a tool you don't know you need until you use it. My company has shared drives, SharePoint, Teams, and of course e-mail so content (multiple versions too - sound familiar?) is all over the place. As a content management professional, I've advocated to management that the official "system of record" for ANY documents needs to be in ELO so we can all work smarter.

Pros

Several things really stand out with ELO. First, when you put content in ELO - documents, email, invoices, or whatever - you can find it later. Search is great (it uses Elasticsearch under the hood). Second, it's great for archiving. You can set up a filing plan, easily build a workflow and whatever needs archiving based on retention schedules, policies, etc., is done automatically. Finally, it integrates with our ERP system, which is nice because I can see 'just enough' customer information - like, did they pay an invoice - without having to get someone to look it up (I'm not in the accounting department), which can be a pain since I work remotely.

Cons

Although it integrates with Microsoft Office nicely, you can't really edit documents in "real time" with other team members like you can in Microsoft Teams. That said, there is a feature called the 'feed' that is basically a chat window where other team members can add comments in real time when a document is being edited.

ELO

Very satisfied. We integrated ELO with Quickbooks and it made a huge difference in how we managed customers and maintenance contracts. Basically we add customers to ELO, add product and maintenance documents to the customer, and then they’re synced up with Quickbooks for billing. We get a whole picture of what’s coming up like scheduled maintenance, work we did in past, what products they have, have they paid, etc.

Pros

Instead of techs calling in and asking us to email them customer info, service contracts, parts, schematics or whatever, they can now look it up on the road really easily. Service techs can get to any customer or product we service at a customer site since ELO works in a browser and there’s a mobile app. It’s really easy to find stuff.

Cons

We use ELO to store inventory and customer documents since Quickbooks isn’t really good at that. I’m sure we could store other kinds of documents in ELO but we haven’t done it yet.