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

There is a right way.

[mrmeval]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system

For that level of documentation you need to have a staff and get it properly indexed. You need a high level librarian. This would be someone with a masters degree at minimum in library science and at least a bachelors in information technology. They will not come cheap and they are a long term investment. The software is available, it is not trivial. Hiring a large number of people to recategorize and tag all the documents for the length of time that takes is also an expense but worth it. Once it's all in place maintaining it gets much easier.

I've seen a system developed for Raytheon. They took all the old compartmentalized data Hughes had and put every scrap of paper through a scanner. It was exceptionally well done. This would display electronic files and would have the location of hard copy. Classified documents were in some cases indexed but were hard copy only afaik. There were some documents that were hard copy only, those were usually ones with an NDA or other restriction on making electronic copies. It had every thing mentioned wrt versioning and such. Documents spanned decades with hundreds of revisions and you could pull up and view any revision. Depending on how recent and what type of document you could view a change log. Older scanned ones did not have that unless they'd been important enough to reenter as modern documents which meant OCR or manually transcribed. Some schematics were reentered into the system in a modern format. The effort was worth it. Having that data is the only way some devices or parts could be made or repaired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system