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

Answered your own question

[Sir_Lewk]

and there is really no naming or numbering convention in place for the files and directories.

I think you already know the answer.

Re:Google to the rescue?

[liquidsin]

use your users, if you can. i'm just talking out my ass here, but i'd think it a not-too-difficult matter to add some sort of user input form along the lines of "hey, now that you've found the document you need, does the name fit the new naming scheme? if not, why not rename it so it fits!". this is assuming you can trust your userbase not to be asshats and to be able to follow the naming protocol.

Re:Google wave

[Anarchduke]

There is a whole profession dedicated to this, and there is a major in college specifically designed to assist in organizing documents into meaningful collections.

I suggest your company look at hiring a library sciences major, since this is what they do.