If you are among the 80% of companies planning to accelerate digital transformation in the coming years, you are likely in the process of moving paper-based processes to digital documentation. While digital documents offer many more efficiencies over old-school processes, they still come with challenges. People waste time searching for email attachments, clicking through complex folder structures, or checking multiple documents for information. Often, people also exchange sensitive data via email or instant messaging, increasing the organisation’s chances of a data breach.
If these challenges sound familiar, Microsoft Syntex provides the tools needed to automate document management and truly elevate your transition to digitalisation.
What is Microsoft Syntex?
Originally introduced as SharePoint Syntex, Microsoft Syntex has become its own AI-driven offering. More than just facilitating document automation, it captures content, categorises documents, and labels data to support compliance. It enables your organisation to access the valuable data often trapped within digital documents. Here are five ways that your business can use Microsoft Syntex.
1. Identify and extract critical information from documents
Every document collected and stored by your business includes critical information that becomes useful when working with customers, partners and colleagues. A new employee contract will have key information that HR and payroll will use for their processes. A form completed by a customer will have contact information and other relevant details that become useful when liaising with them. However, this data tends to become trapped in these documents.
Microsoft Syntex solves this challenge by leveraging AI to identify and extract key information from documents. It then uses metadata to make this information searchable. For example, if a contract contains a customer's contact details and ABN, Syntex can extract this information and make it searchable. Syntex's capability covers a variety of formats, including Microsoft Office documents, PDFs and image file formats ensuring uniform data availability regardless of the document type.
2. Process content with AI
Manually managing content storage is another area of document management that takes significant time from your organisation. Users can configure Microsoft Syntex to automatically classify, extract and route content after adding it to the library. For example, you might program it to automatically classify a document as a content type and then move it to a specific location in your library.
Microsoft Syntex can process content from various document formats, including:
- Pre-built templates: Users give the AI model the information needed to automatically extract information from specific document types.
- Structured content: The AI pulls information from structured documents such as tables or forms where information sits under specific sections or headings.
- Unstructured content: AI models pull information from unstructured content such as letters or contracts.
3. Secure information and maintain compliance
Even if your organisation does not collect a lot of sensitive information from customers, you would have sensitive information stored about your employees, contractors or vendors. So, regardless of your business’ size or industry, compliance and data security are essential.
Microsoft Syntex strengthens compliance by tagging and labelling data extracted from content. With these classifications, Syntex gives your data more structure and makes managing and controlling information easier.
This feature can significantly elevate compliance for organisations managing large amounts of sensitive data. For example, consider a business that stores scanned passports into a SharePoint document library for identity verification. A single security breach could result in catastrophic consequences ranging from reputational damage to hefty fines. Syntex can prevent this scenario by automatically locating and encrypting scanned passports so that they become unreadable even in the event of a breach. It can also automate the disposal of the passports after a period of time to ensure compliance with Australian Privacy Principle 11.2.
4. Automate document handling
Your business stores various documents for different purposes, from employee onboarding information, customer forms, and vendor contracts. Manually creating, completing and handling these documents saps valuable time from your team.
Syntex addresses this challenge by automating document workflows. For example, after someone completes a form, Syntex routes that document to the correct person for review or approval, minimising manual work and accelerating document processing times.
Users can also better categorise documents within the SharePoint library. Your team no longer need to open and check each document to determine its type because Syntex automatically sends it to the right location.
5. Build documents using templates
Many knowledge workers spend too much time copying documents and pasting information on repeated forms. For example, an HR department would probably find themselves duplicating onboarding documentation for new hires, such as data for payroll, employment contracts and other forms relevant to the business.
Microsoft Syntex minimises these challenges by automating document creation using templates. Users can upload their existing Word documents into Syntex to leverage this capability and establish templates for future use. This feature is particularly valuable for people who often duplicate templates or repeatedly copy information.
Conclusion
Microsoft Syntex uses AI and machine learning to process content, improve compliance, enhance workflows and support document management. It extracts key details from documents so people can search and access this information later rather than having it hidden in a vast content library. Additionally, managing documents becomes much easier as Syntex automatically classifies them, routes them to the right location, and sends them to the next person for review or approval.
With Syntex, your organisation can significantly improve document management. Your team will save time handling and storing documents, which can generate savings for the business.
Total Calibration can implement Microsoft Syntex in your business
At Total Calibration, we understand that unstructured and unclassified content hinders operations and decision-making. We do more than simply deploy Microsoft Syntex; we tailor and integrate it with your systems to meet your business’ unique needs. Visit our Solutions for IT page for more information on our offering.
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