How To Manage Hundreds of Thousands of Documents?

ajmcello78 writes "We're a mid-sized aerospace company with over a hundred thousand documents stored out on our Samba servers that also need to be accessed from our satellite offices. We have a VPN set up for the remote sites and use the Samba net use command to map the remote shares. It's becoming quite a mess, sometimes quite slow, and there is really no naming or numbering convention in place for the files and directories. We end up with mixed casing, all uppercase, all lowercase, dashes and ampersands in the file names, and there are literally hundreds of directories to sort through before you can find the document you are looking for. Does anybody know of a good system or method to manage all these documents, and also make them available to our satellite offices?"

Comments

Google wave

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's in beta though.

Re:Google wave

[EQ]

"[O]rganizations managing hundreds of thousands of documents since the Roman Era,"

You mean The Vatican? I doubt that "small aerospace company" could afford to staff up on monks and monasteries.

Re:Google wave

[theNetImp]

monks work for free, they just need food and enlightenment, and if you get lucky they fast and then only need the enlightenment aspect.

How not to do it

[Daimanta]

Store it on a single FAT32 partition and hope for the best. Only meant for people with guts or really really nice bosses.

Re:How not to do it

[CarpetShark]

Pfft. This is a serious job. 320k floppies are what you want.

Or... you know... you could try managing those documents with a document management system.

Re:How not to do it

[selven]

Two of those should be enough for everyone!

Re:Organize the files

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is one of those times, tough.

Re:Google to the rescue?

[mikael]

Just put everything up on a P2P server - then everyone can look for the documents at the same time as they are looking for their favourite Linux distro.

Re:Answered your own question

[CorporateSuit]

No kidding, men are practically born with this instinct.

The most basic is dividing the images up according to hair color or the number of girls appearing in each photo. Then you usually divide them up between hardcore and softcore, type of performance, fetish, etc. For your favorites, you can keep a folder in the home directory, of course. I know this guy works for an aerospace company, but keeping track of 500,000+ files isn't rocket science! We've all been able to do that since the advent of the 200GB harddrive.

Obviously

[kitsunewarlock]

Obviously throw them on the desktop. Once it fills, throw them into a New Folder. Once your desktop fills with Folders, throw those in My Documents. Repeat until your computer crashes.