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OpenEngagement Content Management System
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Overview: OpenEngagement Products and Technologies



See also the OpenEngagement brochure.

OpenEngagement offers you a cost-effective, integrated suite of products to help you achieve significant improvements to the way you do business.

OpenEngagement's premier product is a document management system, OpenEngagement DMS, specifically designed for accountants and auditors. It features very tight integration with CaseWare Working Papers, and is specifically designed to store and maintain CaseWare client files, but is useful for any document type.

The OpenEngagement Initiative
OpenEngagement is a new initiative of CaseWare International, bringing open source solutions to accountants and auditors. This gives customers the best of both worlds as they receive the low cost, high quality and rapid development associated with open source along with the stability, support, services and custom development associated with established major software firms such as CaseWare International. Many other fields have benefited greatly from open source, and the accounting and auditing industries are just starting to now, at the same time that Document Management Systems are moving towards becoming standard.

OpenEngagement allows accountants and auditors to benefit from open source without having to worry about the underlying platform. The fact that the platform is open source affects users only in the low cost. OpenEngagement bundles its solutions to be as simple and well supported as possible.

Product Suite
The OpenEngagement Document Management System (DMS) provides a highly secure central repository for all of a firm's internal and client documents, making it easy to apply staff roles, metadata, searching and much more. OpenEngagement DMS is a web-based application, providing access to documents from anywhere in the world.

OpenEngagement products are provided free; fees apply only to related services, making OpenEngagement one of the most cost-effective document management options available.

OpenEngagement DMS is bundled with OpenEngagement CMS, a broader Content Management Management System, which gives firms even greater abilities to manage their internal documents. Additional OpenEngagement products, Go-Between and Quick Upload, allow firms to work with OpenEngagement DMS from within Working Papers and to perform uploads to OpenEngagement DMS of many files at once.

Accounting Software
OpenEngagement is a key part of the collection of what is becoming the standard software tools for accounting firms:
  • Engagement Management Systems (such as Working Papers)
  • Document Management Systems
  • Workflow Management Systems
As document management and workflow management are becoming key areas for software, CaseWare International, through OpenEngagement, is becoming a major player in these areas. But, though DMS and workflow systems are generally well developed, they are in their infancy with respect to adoption by accounting firms.

In the past, accounting firms worked with paper filing cabinets. One person at a time could view a document. There was no way to collaborate. Staff could work on outside the office, but no one had the benefit of this until they returned to the office. It was difficult to find documents and difficult to track the progress of a document. The technology has improved and some of these issues are now addressed better. Others are just being addressed now with DMS's and other new technology.

In general, the developments in accounting technology over the last ten or fifteen years have allowed accountants to work in a more controlled, and distributed and less paper-intensive manner. DMS systems continue this trend and the trend towards real-time accounting.

DMS General Overview
As DMS systems provide central management for documents, they allows firms to keep track, in one central location, of who has worked on a document and who is scheduled to. Staff can easily see who it is they are waiting for and who should receive documents next. And staff can easily see what documents, at any time, they should be working on. DMS systems also remove versioning issues, caused by photocopying paper files or copying electronic files, creating situations where multiple copies exist and it's not clear what the most recent version is and what version staff should edit.

DMS systems such as OpenEngagement DMS provide:
  • Document Management
  • Storage and Access
  • Multi User/Real time capabilities
  • Security
  • Archiving
  • Retention schedules
  • Search
  • History
DMS systems allow staff to work and collaborate even when outside the office. And, even thought the staff are able to work in a more distributed manner, the central office is more on top of what’s going on, and it’s moving, in this regard, to real-time accounting.

Key Features
OpenEngagement DMS has features that are useful for firm managers and features that are useful for preparers and reviewers.

For firm managers, OpenEngagement DMS provides:
  • A history of activity in the DMS (including who has modified files and when)
  • A bird's eye view of the firm, its engagements and staff
  • A central location to control staff permissions
  • A simple tool to set policies related to automatically setting documents to archived or setting retention schedules
For preparers and reviewers, OpenEngagement DMS provides:
  • An easy means to find documents. For example, users can find all documents related to a given client or given industry.
  • A simple tool to determine the next document they should work on



OpenEngagement DMS: Manage all your documents. Cut costs. Increase efficiencies.

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