Paragon’s new Document Manager keeps all the important documents on an HR microsite well organized and up-to-date regardless of changing filenames.
The Problem: Document Tracking
Part of the reason benefits microsites have become a useful year-round tool for HR teams is they’re a repository of important benefits documents. This gives employees easy access to download important benefits details in the form of pdfs and other documents. Depending on the size of the company, the number of documents stored on these sites can get pretty high. We’ve built portals with up to 50 pdfs linked from various pages throughout the microsite. Yet, keeping those pdfs updated usually involves uploading multiple versions of the same document when typos or other errors are fixed, or simply as plan details change each year.
This can mean that managing these docs, and the links that point to them, can quickly become unwieldy. There are so many PDFs to wade through and no way to easily see which page is linking to each document. This results in employees seeing out-of-date information as they click on links that point to old versions of a particular PDF. Or worse, employees are unable to access a file that was removed but the link to its new version wasn’t updated.
Directly linking to individual files on an HR microsite also makes tracking their effectiveness more complicated. Since each new pdf, even if it’s just a new version of the same document, would be tracked separately, HR teams have to hunt down and compile several different documents’ tracking data just to get a true picture of how employees are using one file on the site.
The Solution: Paragon’s Document Manager
This is why Paragon created a Document Manager plugin that works in the content management system of all our HR microsites. Now, clients can generate a permanent link (called a permalink) that serves as a unique address to any document on the microsite. What makes this useful is that the address is independent of the document’s name. So the file itself could be replaced with an updated version, but the link will still work. Anyone who’s ever used Google Drive will recognize this as one of the handy options when they replace an existing file. There’s no need to hunt around every page of the microsite updating links whenever a new version of a file is uploaded to replace an old one. As long as those links are pointing to the Document Manager’s custom address, they will always pull up the most recent version of the file.
Benefit 1: Confident Link Sharing
This feature gives our HR partners and their clients the confidence to share document links on printed materials, QR codes, newsletters, or other printed materials that can’t be edited after the fact. Once the custom permalink is created in the Document Manager, typos can be fixed at any time without worrying about those printed links being out of date.
Benefit 2: Easier Tracking
Another benefit of using our Document Manager’s custom links is that analytics trackers are attached to the permalink, not the document. So even if the file “Medical Benefits_Details_v1.pdf” is replaced by “Medical_Benefits_Details_v2.pdf” our analytics tracks them both under the custom permalink for “Medical_Benefits_Details”. This way, our HR partners have a true sense of how many times employees are accessing documents on their benefits microsites rather than fragmenting across multiple versions of the same file.
