Re: Need sources for document naming/storage conventions

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

Riça (cleverly cut and pasted because it was faster than looking up the
alt code for a c cedilla):

Naming conventions and folder structures are fast becoming obsolete as a
way of organizing documents.

The biggest problem with any kind of "logical" naming or numbering
system is that the only person who understands the system will be the
person who designed it. Nobody else will take the time to learn it or
remember it later if they do take the time to learn it. As time goes on,
new documents will be named or numbered in a way that does not comply
with the scheme and it will be way too much trouble to rename them.

The problem with tree structures of folders is that different people
classify things in their own minds in very different ways, so what seems
like a perfectly natural way of organizing the folders to you will seem
totally counterintuitive to some ward secretary who gets sent on a
mission to retrieve a particular document.

The more modern approach is to use as flat an organizational structure
as possible (for example, you might need to segregate payroll records
from patient medical records from doctors' research data, for security
and privacy reasons), and to use a comprehensive indexing system that
allows anyone to find anything they're allowed access to. 

As for naming documents, you might consider the radical idea of leaving
filenames just as their authors created them. At most, you might prepend
either a simple sequence number or the year and a sequence number or
possibly the full date (yyyymmdd) or date and time (yyyymmddhhmmss) and
a sequence number, although I think any such scheme is still too
cumbersome.

Now what do I mean by a comprehensive index? Well, you need to be able
to locate a document by author, title, date, subject, keywords, and text
strings, at a minimum. There may be additional attributes you want to
track, as well. If all of your documents are either some type of
Microsoft Office file or a PDF, you can require that the document
properties sheets are completed accurately before submitting a document
for filing. There are probably other file types that can be handled this
way as well. 

Okay, what next? On an NT system, you can turn on Microsoft IIS and scan
the directories where the files are located, then you can provide a Web
Search interface to access the documents. Another approach is to create
a set of mirror directories that you fill with PDF versions of all the
original documents (a little tricky, because when the original Word doc
gets updated, the PDF has to be regenerated, too), and use Acrobat
Catalog to index it.

That's a broad outline of a simple system. Obviously you can get a lot
more sophisticated and spend a lot more money.

HTH,

Dick

rica -dot- handke -at- sickkids -dot- ca wrote:
> 
>
> We need to develop a document-naming convention, as
> well as some convention for naming the folders and subfolders (a.k.a.
> directories and subdirectories), and *fast*! And somehow the task of
> researching the best way to go about designing one has fallen to me.

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