Reinventing Document Management – a SAAS Story

First published on April 17 2025 in Linkedin.

In today’s data-intensive environment, managing documents is no longer just about storage—it’s about collaboration, control and compliance. At VisionFirst Technologies, we helped a Civil Engineering Firm based out of United Kingdom (UK) create SAAS product for Document Management for its high-end Real Estate customers (Architecture Firms, Project Management, Audit Agencies etc.).

With this solution, the customers can concentrate on their core activity (project management and execution) while this solution manages all the documents across multiple organizations with tight access control. The serverless architecture ensured that the application runs at minimum cost when load is low (off-peak hours) and scales fast when load increases.

Here’s how we did it—and what others in the sector can learn.

The Challenge

Our customer realized the need for collaboration among Real Estate service providers in UK. The client, a mid-sized financial services provider, was dealing with:

• Documents shared over emails and there is always a struggle to get hold of the latest version

• Ready-made solutions such as Microsoft 365 is not suitable when multiple organizations are involved

• Documents were spread all over and collecting documents for a project was a challenge

• Can documents be searched by their content?

• How to manage queries and issues among different organizations?

• How to manage which employee will access documents in an organization since these are large organizations.

• Our customer needed a solution that not only solves business problem for their many customers but also earns new revenue in the process. Our customer requested a future-proof system; something that promotes collaboration, easy cost apportionment, agile, secure, and built to support regulatory demands.

Our Solution: A Serverless DMS Powered by AWS

We designed and deployed a fully serverless document management solution that checks all the boxes.

Business Functionality

• Super access to our customer since this is a SASS product

• Ability to create customer organizations (multi-tenant)

• Different kinds of accesses to customer organizations – number of projects, sub-organizations, amount of document storage, number of users

• Collaboration tools such as queries and issues forum with tight access control

• Encryption at rest and in motion

• Ability to enhance security for any one customer organization if required

• Keyword search for documents with access control.

• Semantic search (meaning search, context or sentence vector search) can be implemented as plug-n-play.

• Highly scalable and minimum cost of operation with serverless architecture

• Ability to integrate with customer organizations using API Gateway and specific access control

Technical Components

• Frontend UI to perform business functions

• API Gateway to access functionality and partner integration

• Lambda for event-based logic and secure interactions

• Amazon S3 to store documents with pre-signed URLs for secure access

• DynamoDB for metadata indexing, including labels like customer ID, document type, and timestamp

• S3 Event Notifications to automate tagging, notifications, and indexing

• IAM & Cognito for fine-grained access control and role-based authorization

What Made It Work

1. Sincere Business requirement review and best practices recommendations from VisionFirst Technologies
2. Impeccable Project Management
3. Zero Server Management: No EC2, no provisioning, no patching. The fully serverless architecture means the system scales automatically and costs less.
4. Tagged & Searchable Documents: Each document is uploaded with associated metadata—making it searchable and categorizable instantly.
5. Security at the Core: Code written with secure by design principle. In addition, Pre-signed URLs with limited lifetime, S3 bucket policies, tight IAM access control, Role Based Access Control (RBAC), Data Entitlement and data privacy.
6. Real-Time Access Logging & Alerts Every access is logged via access log and any cloud changes are logged at CloudTrail. Real-time alerts for unauthorized access or abnormal usage patterns.
7. Cost-Efficiency: Using AWS S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Lambda’s pay-per-use model, the customer saved over 60% in infrastructure costs compared to initial estimate.

Why This Matters

In a sector where compliance meets velocity, having the right document infrastructure can determine both operational efficiency and risk posture. When heart meets the capability – it brings transformation.