Document Control Software for Government and Enterprise Document Management: Complete Compliance Guide

In large organizations and government agencies, document control plays a critical role in protecting sensitive information, ensuring compliance, and keeping document workflows running efficiently.

Many of these organizations rely on systems like OpenText Documentum to store and manage content. Documentum is strong when it comes to centralizing information. However, in very large organizations it lacks the flexibility and functionality to power work-in-progress for complex, collaborative, and policy-driven workflows. What begins as a basic document process often turns into a long, difficult, and frustrating experience.

This guide outlines the key challenges, best practices, and how Aproove fills the gaps by streamlining workflows, improving collaboration, and strengthening compliance efforts alongside existing systems.

Why Standard Systems Like Documentum Aren’t Enough

Most compliance-heavy organizations already use enterprise content management tools like Documentum to hub their documents once they reach a certain stage. But Documentum, and tools like it, struggle to help teams power the work of document collaboration, review, and compliance. When it comes to managing workflows around these documents, especially when high-level compliance is involved, teams often run into major roadblocks:

• Rigid workflows make it hard to reflect real-world approval processes.
• Limited workflow builder makes it difficult to design or adapt routing logic that maps to organizational design and needs.
• Linear flows break down when multiple teams need to review simultaneously.
• Workflow changes can require starting a project over from scratch, slowing down change management.
• Version control is messy, making it hard to track edits or compare drafts.

These limitations result in longer review cycles, increased risk of compliance errors, and overall inefficiency, especially on long, multi-stakeholder documents.

Aproove Bridges the Gap

Aproove integrates seamlessly with systems like Documentum to give organizations the flexibility, speed, and transparency they need for critical document processes, without changing their storage system or disrupting existing infrastructure. While Documentum stores and catalogs documents, Aproove can power enterprise work-in-progress, ensuring full compliance.

• Documents are stored in Documentum or another ECM.
• Aproove powers the collaborative drafting, review, and approval workflows around those documents.
• Once finalized, documents can be routed back to Documentum for long-term storage.

It’s a clean, secure, and efficient way to modernize document control—without throwing out your existing systems.

Best Practices for Document Control—Upgraded

Centralize Storage, But Don’t Centralize Bottlenecks

Keep your official documents in a secure, centralized system like Documentum, but route them through Aproove, for everything from draft to final signoff. This ensures a clear single source of truth, without letting your workflow get stuck in rigid architecture.

Use Metadata to Drive Smarter Workflows

With Aproove, workflows don’t just follow a fixed path. They can respond dynamically based on document metadata (e.g., contract type, department, sensitivity). This makes it easier to route the right documents to the right people, no manual rerouting required.

Enable True Cross-Team Collaboration

Where Documentum’s linear structure falls short, Aproove shines. Workflows can include parallel reviews, team tasks, looping approvals, decision branches, and real-time collaboration between legal, compliance, operations, and more. Aproove structures all work into an optimized task list, making teams as efficient as possible to accelerate document work-in-progress.

Don’t Just Track Versions, Understand Them

Unlike traditional systems where version control often means downloading and re-uploading files, Aproove has AI-powered Version Control and Smart Review features. Aproove analyzes each new version pixe-by-pixel and brings reviewers to only the key areas requiring change. Aproove lets you compare versions side-by-side, see change history, and keep everything inside the platform. No more email chains or lost edits.

This not only saves time but significantly reduces risk on sensitive or long-form documentation.

Keep Security Embedded in the Process

With Aproove:

• All work happens in-platform. No need to download documents.
• Files are encrypted, watermarked, and access-controlled.
• Edits can be made within Microsoft Office inside the workflow, so documents stay protected at every stage. Without downloading.

For organizations handling secure or classified information, this is a game-changer.

Get Full Auditability Without Extra Work

Every action in Aproove is logged: who approved what, when changes were made, and how decisions were reached. This creates a clear, defensible audit trail, critical for compliance reporting or internal investigations.

Let the document flow

Instead of forcing a document through one sequential route, Aproove enables you to assign specific sections or entire pages to multiple teams or subject matter experts in parallel. Work-in-progress doesn’t stall because everyone is waiting on a single, final pass. Legal, IT, compliance, or operational teams can all review and approve the portions relevant to them simultaneously.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Outdated or manual systems don’t just slow teams down—they lead to real, measurable consequences:

• Projects fall behind schedule
• Sensitive information ends up in the wrong hands
• Compliance gaps result in audits or fines
• Teams grow frustrated and disengaged
• Time and resources are wasted fixing preventable errors

These aren’t occasional setbacks. They’re everyday challenges for organizations without a structured approach to managing their documents.

Future-Proof Document Control with Aproove

Aproove doesn’t replace tools like Documentum, it enhances it. It brings agility, intelligence, and security to the most critical part of your process: the work that happens between document creation and final archiving.

By integrating Aproove, organizations gain a visual and flexible workflow engine that adapts to real-world approval processes. Smart routing powered by metadata ensures documents reach the right people based on content type or department, while secure, in-platform editing and version control eliminate the need for risky downloads or manual tracking. Teams benefit from full audit trails and policy alignment throughout the document lifecycle, along with true cross-department collaboration that helps speed up reviews without compromising compliance.

It’s a smarter, faster, and more compliant way to manage documents without sacrificing control.

Learn how Aproove makes document compliance workflows smarter from start to finish.