7 Signs Your Document Management Software Is Reaching End of Life

Once your organization deploys a document management solution, it becomes an integral part of your technology infrastructure. This may lead you to ignore the signs that your software solution is reaching its End of Life (Eol). Don’t wait until a software vendor decides that they are no longer updating the product your organization depends on.

EoL is also called sunsetting. Tech Target explains, “Products and services are often sunsetted when they are no longer sufficiently profitable or when a company decides to change its focus.” In addition, due to the scope of some technology advancements it may be more cost-effective to develop new software than to re-engineer an existing product. Make sure that your organization recognizes the signs that your software isn’t keeping pace with cutting-edge technology and may be close to EoL. Then your team can make an educated decision about how to move forward.  

If you notice any of the indicators below, don’t give into the temptation to wait until the software becomes truly unusable. This might be a viable short-term strategy, but it’s risky and not budget friendly According to readwrite a media platform that covers the Internet of Things (IoT) and the connected world, “You could be putting your company’s and customers’ data at serious risk. By losing the ability to upgrade your software with critical bug fixes, [you enable] hackers to waltz right through your front door — no back door required. There are chances security patches could be available, but with a solution that has reached EoL, you’ll likely have to pay for them.”

Don't Ignore These Signs

Your document management solution may be reaching EoL if you notice that it:

1. Is not future-ready

A software solution should be able to communicate between Windows programs, HTML5 web clients, and native mobile applications. It should also integrate seamlessly with updated versions of your ERP, new or existing line-of- business software and be compatible with new operating systems and hardware.

If the design team that created your in-house software has moved on, new IT staff may not fully understand how to resolve issues or update the software. This problem will only get more serious as technology continues to change and advance.

As companies grow and take on new business or expand their products and services, their needs for digital storage expands. A system that you purchased years ago may not have the scalability to keep up with this demand.

4. Doesn’t have a cloud-based option

Even if you aren’t planning to move your documents to the cloud yet, cloud availability is one important way to ensure you're future-ready.

5. Has no mobile capabilities
Your staff expects to have access to work-related documents and processes from their mobile devices. Mobile capabilities enable them to immediately review time-sensitive documents, quickly respond to requests from customers and colleagues, and collaborate effectively whether they’re at home, on the road or at the office.

6. Is not compatible with new versions of on-premises servers

An on-premises document management system should support the leading database server technologies, from the latest Windows versions to MS SQL, MySQL and Oracle. If it doesn’t, you may have to use an unsupported version of this software.

Find out if your system protects you from data loss, fraud and hackers. Check out whether it provides several levels of permissioned access and trace-ability and transparency through logging and analysis capabilities to support compliance.

Cloud-based software should also offer document encryption that meets AES standards and communication encryption that sends online traffic through TLS and HTTPS, and HSTS to protect cloud services against protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking.

DocuWare Is Prepared for the Unexpected

No one can predict the direction new technology will take. At DocuWare, being ready to adapt to new technology and changing business and regulatory requirements is one of the key goals of our development team. We've created a platform that enables us to pivot and adopt to new technology quickly by embracing DevOPs a frequently used aspect of agile methodology. For example, our developers have simplified the process of getting the features we create deployed to both the quality assurance and production environments. Because we have embraced DevOps, we can deploy new code several times a day in order to speed our response to the demands of new technology.

If you have more questions about how to know when your document management software has reached its end of life, let us know in the comments section.