Today, digital transformation is on the agenda for businesses in every sector.
Everyone from the CEO to fresh recruits wants to search and access documents online. Teams across the world need to collaborate remotely to build products and launch projects.
IHowever, one of the major roadblocks faced by businesses is that massive amounts of documents are yet to be digitized. Secondly, older versions of digitized documents may also need to be upgraded to newer, easy-to-access formats.
This is an essential ingredient in the overall digital transformation strategy, especially for businesses that have been around for a longer period. To this end, content conversion services are helping expedite the process and enable digitization with the right formats.
What are Content Conversion Services?
Business documents are present in several formats, including invoices, bank statements, physical books, ledgers, brochures, or handwritten documents. Sifting these documents and creating digital copies can be a mammoth task.
Content conversion services enable businesses to digitize documents with speed and scale and also upgrade digital documents to newer, more accessible formats.
Since businesses also have additional content-related needs, it is ideal to partner with a platform that offers a complete publishing ecosystem that enables them to store, create, convert content and distribute it with ease.
Benefits of Content Conversion
1. There have been several cases where businesses have faced problems signing new contracts or negotiating mergers and acquisitions due to incomplete access to proper documentation. The inability to capture, categorize and search for key documentation can lead to compliance issues and, in turn, loss of business.
2. Digitizing documents early on reduces unnecessary risk. For instance, important paper documents are at risk of being destroyed during a fire or due to excess humidity. There is also a greater risk of document mismanagement. By leveraging content conversion services, these documents can be digitized, categorized, and stored on the cloud, without the risks of paper loss.
3. Ease of access to information, as well as instant access, is another core benefit that enables businesses to make quicker and more accurate business decisions. Once digitized documents are stored on the cloud, they can also be accessed by relevant stakeholders around the globe.
4. Paperless workflows lead to increased productivity, enabling teams to move faster on projects. Workforces can further leverage automation, AI, and data analytics, to build insights from freshly digitized data.
5. Documents saved in old, redundant formats such as Flash are not compatible with all devices. They are also not searchable. Upgrading existing digital documents thus makes them easy to access.
Getting Started
1. TThe first step is to gather all documents that need to be digitized in one place. These can include contractual agreements, financial papers, official correspondences, HR files, survey maps, bills and invoices, books, journals and research papers, photographs, and medical records. The spectrum of documents is, of course, not limited to these categories.
2. Choose a content conversion service provider that enables easy conversion of a wide spectrum of documents.
3. Ensure that the service provider offers ample, secure, and confidential cloud storage of digital documents. Privacy and security of digital documents are major concerns for businesses.
4. Going forward, businesses can also leverage additional services such as easy content creation and distribution of content to all stakeholders with ease by using old-school features such as attachments.
Guide to Content Conversion Service Capabilities
1. XML conversion:
Old data formats can be converted into versatile XML files, which enable team members to access content in versatile ways, and support easy data sharing between various operating systems, software, and applications.
2. PDF conversion:
Documents, journals, books, brochures, reports, and invoices can be converted into PDFs, which are searchable across devices.
3. Photographs:
Photographs can be converted to JPEGs and TIFF file formats using a digital scanner.
4. Optical Character Recognition (OCR):
This tool enables the conversion of a scanned image into text. The documents are editable, allowing the users to run a search within the document using keywords and metadata.
5. Flash to HTML5 conversion:
Several businesses still have documents in the now defunct Flash format. These can easily be converted to HTML5 using relevant tools, enabling them to be accessed across all devices. HTML5 files are compatible across multiple platforms, eReaders, tablets, and smartphones, offering multimedia support. Moreover, content can be hyperlinked to internal and external links.
6. HTML to PDF:
Content conversion tools also enable easy conversion of HTML files, including part of or an entire web page, into PDFs right from your web browser. PDFs can be saved on the cloud, or one’s device, as desired.
7. ePUB conversion:
Today, more and more content creators, authors, and publishers are looking to create and save content in the ePUB format, which supports audio, video, and interactive formats. ePUB3, an HTML5 format, allows hyperlinking of text to internal and external sources. It additionally has SEO capabilities, enabling content searches based on keywords.
In Conclusion
Bringing all paper and digital documents up to speed is a one-time exercise for businesses as part of their larger digital transformation goals. Early investment in this process enables higher productivity, document workflow, compliance, and easy access to valuable documentation.
If your business is looking to invest in the digital transformation process, Hurix Digital is geared to advise, guide, and provide end-to-end content conversion services as a future safeguard for all key documentation.
Drop us a line at marketing@hurix.com to start a conversation and get the support needed to expedite your business goals.