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 to the rescue?

[Shatrat]

Isn't this the sort of thing that a google search appliance would be helpful for? Then you don't need to know the exact filename, just some specific information that can identify the file. This certainly solved my problem with having thousands of emails.

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:Google to the rescue?

[gwait]

I agree - although you might want to eventually implement a systematic method of naming/storing your documents.
The google appliance (or some other reasonably fast "WAN" search tool) would let you find files in the current rats nest "as is", making it easier to organize them to the new "standard".

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 to the rescue?

[CozmicCharlie]

Now I actually LOL'd on that one! Getting our userbase to actually give a flying fart about a naming protocol and then getting them to follow it!? I won't be holding my breath for either of those two things to happen...

Re:Google to the rescue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - Slashdot users must all be on their meds this week. Judging by the number of responses to that say to buy a google appliance, I judge the paranoia level to be closer to blue than red. Where the hell is the open source insight?

I guess it's right here from good old Anonymous - ever hear of SOLR http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ ? It's free, it's opensource and even if you hire a consulting company to set up an index of everything you have, you'll pay pennies on the dollar compared to a google appliance! Plus - your soul will remain intact!

Just google for SOLR consultants and you'll find them, no problem :-)

Re:Google to the rescue?

[shri]

May I also suggest Yahoo/IBM's OmniFind as a free as beer alternative?

Re:Google to the rescue?

[vrmlguy]

Now I actually LOL'd on that one!

Getting our userbase to actually give a flying fart about a naming protocol and then getting them to follow it!?

I won't be holding my breath for either of those two things to happen...

You obviously don't know how to motivate people. Tell your boss you can get everything renamed for $100/week. Then post a leader board showing who has renamed the most documents each week, and give each week's winner a gift certificate to a local restaurant. Don't let anyone win more than once a month, to prevent too much disruption of normal job duties, and set up some sort of meta-moderation to prevent gaming the system. (You could probably use slashcode out-of the-box, just make each document a story and suggest better names in the comments.)

Re:Google to the rescue?

[SlashWombat]

I agree - although you might want to eventually implement a systematic method of naming/storing your documents.

While this seems like a good idea on the surface, it never seems to work very well. Even verbose file names seem to fail miserably, as the first 100 or so letters are always the same (IE:"Project Tiger Sausage rocket module assembly - Ion injector harware part 1 ...>

Then there is the problem of getting all the employees to fully understand directory structures. Just look at your workmates screens to see how many people save everything on their desktop. (Yes, really a windows problem ... but so what.)

I used to get a local WAN search engine, and let it index the entire site. Much more useful as it would find documents most people thought had disappeared years ago.

Another approach would be to have a database that assigned file names for various projects and/or functions and mandate that this be the only way files are named for storage on the WAN. This, however, does not get around the thousands of files already stored in weird places using weird names! (Which is why an already indexed search engine works so well ... not only does it extract the file names, but also search on random (but significant) phrases are picked up within the scanned documents. (I used to use "MAMMA", it worked a treat!) http://www.mamma.com/

Google Appliance

[TornCityVenz]

Google them? http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html

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!

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:Answered your own question

[peektwice]

Absolutely correct. However, I would take it a step further and say that you need a document management system that manages security, meta-data, retention, disposition, etc. Examples are Documentum, IBM FileNet P8, Alfresco, etc. Here's a place to start readin: http://www.cmswire.com/.

Re:Answered your own question

[nine-times]

Yeah, some people mentioned Google appliances, which I suppose is a sort-of solution. I've never used one of those internally, but I wouldn't trust that to be the end-all solution to your organizational problems. What if there's a file that Google can't read or gather good metadata for? What if you're searching for common terms, and the file you're looking for is on the 75th page? What if you're not remembering the correct search parameters and so your file just isn't turning up in your searches?

There's really no substitute yet for real organization and discipline. The first thing you should do is define your needs/parameters. Does everyone from every site need read access to all files? Do they all need write access? Most likely, the answer to both of these questions is "no", so narrow it down to specifically "who needs access to what". That will help you figure out the rest of these things. Also ask, who needs to be able to find which documents under which circumstances? What information will they have? You're going to want to use those pieces of information in your organization so that people can intuitively find the files that they need, without necessarily needing to see everyone else's files.

Come up with a hierarchical organization for your files, requesting user input if appropriate. Then create a directory structure that matches it. Make sure you've communicated the organization clearly to your users, and try to get them to use it.

If necessary, use directory permissions to try to restrict writing files to appropriate places. For example, if you break down the file structure by particular engineering groups or departments, then only provide write access to members of that group or department. Designate the head of that department as the person responsible for organization within that folder. If need be, restrict write access in a particular folder to only one person, and make that person responsible for checking files in and maintaining the organization for the group or department. Do the same sort of control with individual satellite sites, if appropriate.

Be a little tiny bit of a control freak, but you might want to give people a particular folder share where they can transfer files in a more freeform manner in a pinch. Someone might want to share one particular file, back something up for a minute, or whatever, but make it clear that this share is completely insecure and temporary. Let people know that everyone has access to that share, anyone can delete any file, you won't be backing it up, and in fact you might be clearing it out (deleting it) on a regular basis. Make a habit of deleting it all on a regular basis, or people will start dumping everything there to sidestep the organization. To be careful, you might want to actually move everything into a non-shared folder for a week, and then deleting it later, so if someone shows up and says, "Oh crap! You deleted business-critical information!" you can sigh, and say, "I'll see what I can do, but you really shouldn't store business-critical data there."

So, to go back and summarize: Come up with an organization, stick to it, enforce it, and retrain your users to use it properly.

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.

Re:Answered your own question

[oldspewey]

LMAO ... Documentum is almost dead ... that's why they released V6.5 several months back and are on track to release V7 in H1'10.

Why don't you tell us all how your "competitor" company scales to tens of millions of documents with high availablity, disaster recovery, and content caching across 5 continents?

it's all about the index

[Hognoxious]

The lack of a naming convention for the filenames and directories is neither here nor there. What matters is how well it's indexed.

Now I use naming conventions for my files (photos ,mp3s etc). Am i contradicting myself? No, it's because I don't have enough of them that I need a separate index.

Re:it's all about the index

[jd]

Very true. I'd take a look at DSpace or Open Library for examples of software designed to handle gigantic numbers of documents and maintain sensible indexes for them.

Re:Hummingbird Document management

[HikingStick]

If they're going to consider Hummingbird, they need to be ready to cough up the dollars to get an *EXPERIENCED* Hummingbird administrator. If not, the product will be set up, but basic search functionality will be hosed because of some of the same issues in the original problem description (arising from differences in how the document's properties sheets are populated). If done well, it can be fantastic. If not, it users will hate it and do everything possible to avoid it (including installing their own NAS devices).

Google Search Appliance

[Swampash]

http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/

Alfresco or SharePoint

[flydpnkrtn]

Or some other corporate content management system

Re:Alfresco or SharePoint

[flydpnkrtn]

...and I found an article backing up Alfresco pretty well:

"You can now stand up an Alfresco Labs server next to a SharePoint Server, and Office will not be able to tell the difference between the two," said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. "But we are offering considerably more scale than SharePoint can deliver," he said.

Re:Alfresco or SharePoint

[Kadin2048]

I have a personal bias, but I think IBM's FileNet would solve this quite neatly. I've done implementations of it that are pretty much exactly what the OP describes.

Customer has a share that's gotten totally out of control, just stuffed full of files. They want to make them available across multiple offices, generally without getting into complex VPN crap, and also want to simplify management, add more security / compartmentalization, or integrate it with corporate SSI. All doable. Runs on your choice of platforms, too. (Linux, Unix/AIX, Windows all OK as servers.)

There are even tools that basically take a share drive and walk the directory structure, importing documents at extremely high volume and using the folder structure to categorize and tag the documents within FileNet. It's quite slick and can either be used as a one-shot migration from a traditional fileserver to FileNet, or as an ongoing thing (take all files in a particular directory or set of directories and commit them).

Once you have the documents into FileNet you can access them over a web interface or via various desktop clients, and there is a nice API for integrating it with custom in-house applications if that's a requirement. Also, IBM makes some add-ons for Word and Excel (and maybe PowerPoint) that allow you to work directly with items stored in a FileNet repository. Plus, if down the road you want to get into "workflow" (basically building your document management system around your business process), that can be easily bolted on.

Email is in profile if you want specific case studies or whitepapers, or if you want me to put you in touch with people who do these sorts of things regularly.

Re:Alfresco or SharePoint

[afidel]

I'd suggest Livelink by OpenText. I know the Airforce uses it since our Livelink guy worked on their systems before coming to work for us, they obviously work with large volumes of aerospace related documents! =) That probably means OpenText can find consultants who have already designed and worked with an aerospace taxonomy.

Use a cataloging system

[vondo]

I happen to have written one:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/docdb-v/

could be what you are looking for. Of course, it'll take effort to catalog the documents.

SharePoint?

[tekiegreg]

I know I'm gonna get hit for blurting out the Microsoft Solution but...give SharePoint a shot...

Re:SharePoint?

[goffster]

Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.

Re:SharePoint?

[moosesocks]

Mod parent up. I helped create a tag-based document retrieval system for my former employer using SharePoint. It actually worked quite well.

Use the right tool for the job. It's got a nice interface (that's also very familiar-looking to most users), scales well, and integrates well with MS Office, which (like it or not) is used by 99.99% of the corporate world. It also handles non-office files just fine.

That's not to say that Unix-based solutions don't have their place. During the migration, I actually employed a series of shell/python scripts to assist with several of the more mundane aspects of the process. These probably saved us a couple thousand man-hours that would have otherwise been spent categorizing the files.

Re:SharePoint?

[moosesocks]

Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.

No less proprietary than other similar systems. Getting files in/out of Sharepoint is a fairly trivial process, and the API is open enough to craft your own migration plan if you ever decide to move away from it, given that everything else is equally (or even more) proprietary than Sharepoint.

MS Office might be proprietary, but is so widespread that it's a 'standard' in its own right -- Sharepoint integrates excellently with Office, and keeps your users happy.

I'm typically not one to advocate the use of Microsoft products. However, Sharepoint worked just fine when I was using it, and is definitely a huge step up from any of the competing products at the same price-level.

Re:SharePoint?

[pete-classic]

How does Sharepoint address his problem? It uses the exact same folder/file paradigm that is failing in his existing solution.

-Peter

Re:SharePoint?

[glitch23]

That's true of any other solution in the same manor as SharePoint. But at least the data is stored in a SQL database and not something proprietary like the MS Exchange information store.

Although the files are in a database you can change the view in the browser to be "explorer" and access the files using Windows File Sharing-like features (copy/paste) through the browser. This method of access though is an end-run around SharePoint's versioning system. New files can be uploaded in this manner as well. I presume that when you modify an existing document in this way that SharePoint just makes that version the newest one in the actual database. SharePoint is still no substitute for a properly standardized naming convention and folder structure. Yeah you can always do a SharePoint search for what you want but at work I never do searches because we have specific folders where we place stuff and I know that as long as people follow the standard then I can find what I'm looking for and so can everyone else. We don't have thousands of documents though so maybe with documents counted using 6 digits a standard naming convention is asking too much.

Re:SharePoint?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you say:

Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.

What you mean:

Regardless of how perfect a solution might be for you, if it doesn't conform to MY personal ideological viewpoint, it shouldn't be given a chance.

God I hate people like you.

--AC

Re:SharePoint?

[nighty5]

We use SharePoint in a large enterprise although its pretty good at mashing together websites - unfortunately its really poor at search. I think Search 4.0 may improve the situation, but its nowhere near Yahoo, Google or other search technology. Technology doesn't solve all problems, I'd say this said company needs to focus on strengthening business process and implementing some user awareness programs.

Re:SharePoint?

[preystalker]

I would recommend using Alfresco. Correct configured and deployed, you could access files via Windows Explorer, WebDav, web interface, etc. and data is stored in a SQL database. Alfresco uses open standards and should be considered instead of SharePoint.

Documentum

[trondwn]

use EMC document solution, where you have all documents i central database with metadata that can describe content. And can be accessed thru cached server from different sites.

Document management software

[Wrexs0ul]

Most print companies like Xerox have their own proprietary Document management tools you can buy, and a bunch of CRM and ERP solutions (like OpenERP - it's free AND Open Source) provide some good simple document searching and indexing tools.

Really it comes down to how complex you want searching to be? Are there specific keys in the document you could index by? Do you require the full-text search capabilities of a Google search appliance?

A really good solution I've come across for some clients in Edmonton is Called MetalTrace by Trace Applications. Don't let the name fool you about the specificity, software like this can Scan, Index, and even read barcodes on all sorts of documents then let people search for it via the web. Their "killer-app" has multiple user-defined document types with multiple search fields, combined with some back-filing (digital and scanning) really saved the day.

Do your research though on "Document managment" and see what product best fits your needs. It's a really well established field so reinventing the wheel is a little masochistic... not that there's anything wrong with that. ;)

-Matt

Re:Document management software

[MyDixieWrecked]

Most print companies like Xerox have their own proprietary Document management [wikipedia.org] tools you can buy

Document management software is great, but when you have enormous numbers of documents (100s of thousands like in the summary), it becomes necessary to have a content management system in place. Something that's intelligent enough to break the documents up into pieces and allow searches, but something more robust than full-text search.

We've been using this software called MarkLogic Server (http://marklogic.com). It's an XML database and has a content processing framework for document ingestion. So, basically, assuming that documents are structured similarly, they can be converted into XML so they can be queried with custom weights being applied to content in different portions of the document. The software has built-in Word support so it'll automatically convert .doc files with proper formatting as well as the ability to add custom handlers for other formats including plaintext.

We're currently managing a couple million documents and generating dynamic documents on the fly for some processes. Since on-the-fly documents may take time to generate, we have a system in place that saves the result in the database which can also be queried at a later date. It's all really cool.

Of course, there's a bit of a learning curve to writing your own software for it since it uses XQuery, but it's not much harder to learn than SQL, and so far, it seems to be far more powerful.

Disclaimer: I'm not a shill nor am I being paid in any way by MarkLogic... I'm just seriously blown away by what their technology has enabled us to do.

Knowledge Tree

[crackervoodoo]

http://www.knowledgetree.com/ If you're looking for a no-cost (read as no license fee) option then Knowledge Tree Community Edition is a decent Document Management tool. We've been using it for a couple of years.

Get yourself a good management system.

[Anonymous Coward]

While this may be an odd suggestion, here's two things:
1) Get yourself a damn good document or content management system. Get it set up on the baddest machines you can afford.Overshoot the capability you need, so that you have room to grow.
2) Get a librarian to look at the kinds of documents you create, and develop a system to catalog documents while maintaining reasonable standards for file names. As the super simplest system, maybe document names that indicate (at a minimum) what project or what overhead department they belong to, a broad category of subject matter, and if it's versioned, a version number.

I tried to bludgeon a small company I worked for (around 40 engineers, one overworked Q&A person, and one system administrator) into moving towards a storage system for word documents that was not "Create a new folder for each version of the document set, place them all in the right folder, and if you don't Ray will eat your head." We wound up using (of all things) Perforce SCM to house fifty thousand word documents, and were starting on putting actual code revisions for automated test sets into the system when our avionics testing focus became a serious liability, and overhead workers were drastically cut. (Why have one Q&A guy and one system admin guy? We can get an intern to do BOTH!)

Lots of ECM solutions out there...

[jwilkins13]

Sure, with any number of ECM solutions. At the simplest end many of them simply enforce naming conventions; at the more robust end, they support many different file types for viewing, indexing, etc. and can also provide rich metadata on a document-by-document basis. Some of them have been named in the comments, including but certainly not limited to SharePoint 2007, Cygnet, Documentum, Open Text, FileNet, etc. Any system worth looking at has a web-based interface, at least for searching, and many of them offer for more meaningful interaction as well. Alfresco, Hyland, and SpringCM all have web-based ECM solutions and more comprehensive web-based offerings are available all the time. Oh - and if you're aerospace there are a number of regulatory requirements for information management you'll need to comply with, which does complicate the situation but spending the ducats for software and/or consulting help is probably cheaper than whatever your litigation and regulatory audit support processes cost today. Hope this helps, Jesse Wilkins ECM and other stuff consultant jwilkins13 at gmail dot com

Re:Hummingbird Document management

[kiwimate]

Yes, but it's not that hard to find someone. But Hummingbird (now owned by Open Text) or any other Document Management System. You've got a bunch of documents. You need to manage them. Ergo, a document management system.

Parent makes an excellent point, however: the single most critical component of a successful implementation is to get a skilled* consultant who can work with you to properly define the taxonomy. Everything else flows from there.

* If you go with Hummingbird DM, "skilled" means "not one of their over priced professional services people". They're dreadful.

Switch to Apple...

[Tibor the Hun]

I only partly jest, I know such a thing is damn near impossible to actually do, but in our Mac shop, such things are trivial. With one click of the mouse we enable spotlight searching on our Leopard AFP server and bam... all the clients have almost instantaneous search access to their docs.

nothing beats a folder structure and naming

[fxdgear]

I'm gonna say nothing beats a proper folder structure and naming convention. I'd also recommend using svn. Also spend some time to develop some macros to assist in the creation/saving/retrieval of said documents from the repository. Maybe create some standard templates too... just my 2cents!

WebDav

[SplashMyBandit]

There are a few options:

• For relatively unstructured data without versioning you could serve them over HTTP with WebDAV (Apache) and use your existing HTTP security mechanisms. You wouldn't believe how relieved I've often been when I can get my (secured) resources from home-base while located at a clients site.
• My outfit uses KnowledgeTree for versioned stuff (http://www.knowledgetree.com/)
• Or you could embrace your dark-side and use Microsoft SharePoint (plus, with all the Microsoft bugs you'd have a job for life until your employeer goes bust). If you are a friend to your company you won't do this, plus your outfit has engineers and the good ones can spot trash solutions.

If you users are naming their files with strange characters in them (assuming it's not due to Samba) then they will just have to live with it, you won't have time to sort out all the wierd names that (mostly MS-Word) users give to their filenames. The primary objective should be to give your users access to the files. Making the directory listing pretty ought to be a secondary concern.

FileNet

[Ohio Calvinist]

I worked at a place that used FileNet, which is now an IBM product, to do this sort of thing. We had millions of scanned documents in the system. I wasn't personally very impressed with it, in that whenever anything "bad" happened, you had to call IBM because finding support online was impossible, and at that they support wasn't very good. It was also a very picky system, those seemed to handle the load well. If you go with it, I strongly encourage doing it for UNIX/Oracle because it screamed "poorly ported" when we used it for Windows/MSSSQL. It has an API for integration, but it is also, poorly documented and would take some time to integrate into your existing business systems.

This is more of a rant at this point, but it is a stop-gap solution that allows people to continue to use outdated business processes storing important data in image formats or in documents scattered about with minimal indexing/search capabilities, rather than analyzable "data" that can lead to "information." I always take the position that if the goal is something on paper, or the goal is to store something that "was" on paper, it is time to rethink the business process to see if we can automate it, or store/present the data electronically in the first place. The old school fights against it, but no one has ever been able to say it wasn't more efficent in the end and enabled IT to say "yes we can" when the next great idea came along versus "here is a stack of papers, figure out $trend."

Technical issues aside

[Vroom_Vroom]

Hire a document manager / clerk person who will create order. Your engineers won't.

Re:Google wave

[Gerzel]

Or better yet talk to people who've done it before. I mean seriously there have been organizations managing hundreds of thousands of documents since the Roman Era, its nothing new.

Alfresco

[SplashMyBandit]

I forgot to mention Alfresco as well, although I've never personally tried it.
http://www.alfresco.com/index-b2.html

Laserfiche

[wguy00]

Laserfiche (or LF) is just what this is for. It is DOD, DOJ certified and crap, and is used by all branches of the military and several other areas of the government as their document management system. With several different software offerings, just about any situation can be taken care of. It's features include the ability to search based on document name, template information, or OCR'd text (which the software also takes care of). With add-on features such as Quick Fields, it may be able to automatically sort, add template information, OCR, name and then store the documents. It really is a nice way to go. Satellite offices can access and be either full or read-only users. It has the ability and modules to connect to just about any other type of data/information system (GIS, financial software, etc) and is very scalable.

I was a tech for 5 years with a LF VAR. I'm not there anymore. We were constantly cleaning up messes left by other document management systems. Take your time with this thing and really plan your naming convention, folder hierarchy and user setup. It's easier to get it right(or as close to it as possible) then going back and having to fix it later. A good LF VAR should help you with this. Definitely check references of competing companies. Some VAR's are A LOT better than others.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Odd that the next story...

[ak_hepcat]

Odd that the next story has a great idea for document management right in the summary...

Hadoop!

SharePoint

[PIPBoy3000]

NASA is a big user of SharePoint, strangely enough. My coworkers run into their folks at conferences from time to time.

I personally am ambivalent about SharePoint. Its roots are in document management, so it seems to do that relatively well. The publishing features are fairly nice as well. I don't think it's the best system for making web sites, but it may some day get there. Currently it feels like a 2.0 product (the magic rule is to never buy anything from Microsoft before 3.0).

There are gotchas. SharePoint is tightly coupled with your clients. If everyone accessing the documents are using the latest version of Office, you'll be okay. If not, you'll run into problems. You may also need to throw a lot of hardware into SharePoint, as storing files inside of SQL has some built-in inefficiencies.

Still, some of our users seem to love SharePoint, so it might be a good option for you.

Alfresco of course!

[thule]

It can scale extremely well. It is the backend to Adobe's acrobat.com website! So you know it can handle millions of documents if you need it to. Sharepoint requires MS SQL Server for searching documents. With Alfresco, that feature is built in.

Sharepoint is teaming software and not really designed for large document repositories. Alfresco has a teaming interface (Alfresco Share) and a more generic document repository interface.

Alfresco can expose the repository via FTP, SMB, WebDAV, and a web client interface.

WIKI

[unum15]

Maybe not the best solution for this particular job, but man am I glad we started using Dokuwiki for all our scattered documents.

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

Old tech

[DerekLyons]

It's called an index or a bibliography. There exists a profession known as 'librarian' specifically trained in the creation of such and in the management of large numbers of documents.

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.

Oracle or Alfresco

[steverar]

We went through this for both document management and web front end for access. We looked through, Sharepoint, Alfresco, Oracle UCM, Reddot and a few others. We dropped most due to cost, functionality, and ease of use for non-developers to do page work. Sharepoint was dropped due to cost in an internet setting (CALs), no non-developer front end for page layout (they couldn't use HTML) and it stores everything in the database. From prior experience this made backup/restore difficult as it keeps the IP ofthe web site in the database when you backup. If you restore to a different machine it gets confused. It was between Oracle and Alfresco. You cannot go wrong with either. Both are extensible, either have what you need built in or can be added easily. Both are good for non-developers to use. Support is very good with either. We went with Oracle. While it did cost more it matched our existing infrastructure.

Mac OS X Server - Spotlight Server

[Gary W. Longsine]

Since your organization probably has Windows clients, you can only long for something as nice as Mac OS X Spotlight Server.

Google Search Appliance is definitely what you want.

If you have a mid sized company you definitely don't have the surplus of highly talented systems administrator talent laying about to run one of the document management systems that others here are likely to suggest. Be very careful going down the document management server path. It's far, far more work than you think it will be, than the vendor will tell you it is. Not simply more work for you, but for your IT staff and your users, too.

The Google Search Appliance, by contrast, is "fire and forget". Plug it in. Turn it on. Patch it when Google suggests you do so. That's about it.

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.

Re:Hummingbird Document management

[dimeglio]

Skilled consultants are great but without training employees you'll keep on paying big $ for consultants whenever there's a change to make. Let the consultant show how and let the employees do the work. BTW: We have 3000+ users (all happy) on their system and no consultant.

Garbage In Garbage Out

[sexconker]

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.

Slow. Upgrade your network and VPN. You know that VPN layer is just killing your performance.

No naming or numbering convention. Get one.

Mixed casing. Learn How to Properly Case Folders (and documents).

Dashes and ampersands. Are they a problem? Aesthetically unpleasant? I personally restrict punctuation in a filesystem to dashes, periods, and parenthesis (unless the punctuation is a replicable part of the name of the file/folder).

Examples:
01 - The First Track (vocal)
02 - $lashhvertisements Attack!
03 - Where Have All the A.C.'s Gone

Develop your own method that works and be obsessed about it to the point where you would reburn a disc if one of the filenames was "01-Name" instead of "01 - Name".

Hundreds of directories.
Each file should have it's own folder.
"That's insane!" you say. Start out with this mentality. If there is no reason at all to separate two files (they are part of the same thing) then place them in one folder, and make sure the folder is named all-encompasingly. Repeat for all files. If you get into a AB, BC, but not ABC situation, the solution is to have A and B and C, with A and C linking to B with your choice of shortcut/link/symlink/etc.
Do this until all files are in folders. Then repeat with folders.

There is NO substitute for organization and getting people on the same page. Develop some conventions. Task people to fix as they go. Check up to make sure people accessing documents are fixing as they go, and doing so according to convention. Once people are used to the convention, and once things are relatively organized, they won't ever need to search again. They'll instantly know where 99% of things are, and will be able to dig around and find anything else within seconds.

The main problem you face is getting organized after already being unorganized. It isn't easy, but at least you're not dealing with millions of paper documents.

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.

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.

Suggestion - A proper Content Management System

[NacMacFeegle]

Some of the suggestions above says that you should just chuck everything haphazardly into a big pile and then use search engines to trawl the whole mess. I don't buy that. Instead, (like some others) I'd suggest a proper content management system such as the ones from http://www.alfresco.com/, http://www.interwoven.com/ or http://www.hummingbird.com/.

The reason for this suggestion is that I know that these systems are being used by organisations which handle, as OP said, hundreds of thousands of documents and which have satellite offices (e.g. large multinational lawfirms). They provide several benefits such as the possibility to structure projects, have both project related documents and e-mails saved and indexed in the project folders, allows for searching and proper document version chains (meaning that you can revert to older versions of documents if some klutz breaks a newer version).

Of course, this means quite an investment, a learning curve for everyone at your company and, most likely, the hiring of an individual with experience of the chosen system.

DMS vs. Repository

[oneiros27]

I'm surprised that there were quite a few programs not mentions on the DMS wikipedia page -- People might consider them to be more as repository software than DMS (or RMS), but some other ones to mention that would be useful to managing already existing documents:

• FedoraCommons
• DSpace

And if you're looking for librarians with an IT background, in the libraries they're called "Systems Librarians". You might also check out the oss4lib and code4lib communities.