Tips

1. Any sheet of paper that is classified as of little or moderate importance (business phone bills or travel expenses receipts) is a potential candidate to be digitally archived. You can either destroy such documents or keep them in a store.

2. Get the hardware needed for a digital office. A scanner (or better still a document scanner) will convert your paper documents into digital copies.

3. Develop a "paper to digital" conversion process. Decide policies (filename convention and storage location for example) and make everybody in the company aware of the process so they can follow it.

4. Identify who needs access to digitised documents. Avoid file duplication and data loss by limiting access to the documents to reliable employees trained to follow your data policies.

5. Make locating digital documents quick and easy. Use any of the dozens of 3rd party applications that allow you to search for documents according to author, content, date or file properties.

To learn more about how to turn your paper office into a digital one, why not read our data management guides:

Building a knowledge base

Controlling access to data

Protecting important data

Sharing data