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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?"
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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Google them? http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Store it on a single FAT32 partition and hope for the best. Only meant for people with guts or really really nice bosses.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
and there is really no naming or numbering convention in place for the files and directories.
I think you already know the answer.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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).
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Or some other corporate content management system
Here's to the crazy ones
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.
I know I'm gonna get hit for blurting out the Microsoft Solution but...give SharePoint a shot...
...in bed
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
--- Need web hosting?
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.
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.
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.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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.
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."
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Hire a document manager / clerk person who will create order. Your engineers won't.
Boing boing boing....
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.
Maybe not the best solution for this particular job, but man am I glad we started using Dokuwiki for all our scattered documents.
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
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"[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.
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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.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
monks work for free, they just need food and enlightenment, and if you get lucky they fast and then only need the enlightenment aspect.
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.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain