Browsing » AwareBase News
Project and Document Management Software for as little as $9.99 per user per month (perpetual license)
Why File Management Software Beats Windows Network Drives
November 24, 2011
You could say that a big reason we invented TINA, our file management software, was to get around the inequities of storing files in Windows network drives. Our TINA software acts as a file clerk that fetches the files that you are looking for, right now, without needing to know any odd hierarchies or naming conventions.
How File Hierarchies Get Convoluted, Fast
When you set up a windows file folder hierarchy, you are establishing relationships. Some of these relationships make sense to those sharing files in the same department, but rarely do they make sense to someone on a company-wide scale. Many companies realize this and try to tame the beast by drafting a document storage policy that normalizes these relationships, but these relationships can pose problems.
File Folder Relationships too Rigid
The problem with file folder hierarchies is that the relationships are too rigid. Employees need more than one way to get at a file to work the most efficiently.
If you are a new employee or contractor being paid by the hour and you have to spend your time wading through parent/child folder relationships that make sense to long term employees but not to you, the company that hired you has just wasted a bunch of money. What you need is a search engine for files, not a windows network file folder.
Similarly, you may be looking for a customer’s contract that you signed up the other day. You can remember the contract type, but not the customer, and all the folders are arranged by customer. You also require a search engine rather than a folder hierarchy.
You should be able to find anything you want based on its relationships to other files, information about the file (think library card), or keywords in the content of the file. That perfect world exists, and you can have it with TINA, the file management system from AwareBase.
Formal Network Folders Policies Help, But Don’t Solve the Problem
A formal policy put in place by the IT department of a larger corporation that is actively policed is a good start to getting a handle on file management mayhem. It is best to have this policy include file naming conventions, which will tell you what kind of file it is and where it belongs. But these policies and conventions bring their own set of problems.
If you have 10 new contracts a day, you want to be consistent in terms of your naming approach. You want them to look very similar from a filing naming perspective. If you don’t have a file management system like TINA, you end up stuffing file attributes into the name that TINA would store in the ‘library card’ or metadata, making file names unnecessarily long and making employees remember a near-impossible set of criteria. With TINA, an employment contract can transform from HRCONTRACT-NEWEMPLOYEE-FirstNameLastName-SIN-Latest-Latest-Latest to HRCONTRACT-FirstNameLastName. TINA will have stored all of the other information in metadata, making it unnecessary to duplicate the effort in the file naming convention.
Even Small Companies Work With Large Numbers of Files
One of our engineering clients was not a large business. However, they were working with 55,000 network file folders and over 2 terabytes of electronic files. Nobody could find anything until we showed up with TINA and got their information organized.
Back to the Future with TINA
TINA may not be a time machine, but what it does do is take you back to the days of the rooms filled with vertical filing cabinets and one or two knowledgeable file clerks who were the custodians of the files – the days when corporate information was managed and controlled. You would ask the file clerk to file a document, or ask them to find one for you. TINA does the same thing. When your employees open TINA, they see something like the home page of Google: a search box. They tap their search in, TINA fetches the file, and they can check it out and start working on it if they have the proper access rights.
In the computer age, vertical filing cabinets have been replaced with network drives and Windows File Folders. And skilled filing clerks have been replaced by…you. Stepping back in time, you’ve basically fired all the clerks and opened the room full of filing cabinets to everyone. No wonder nobody can find anything. TINA is your electronic file clerk and search engine, and it will ensure that everything you need to keep track of is there and properly accounted for.
Contact us today to find out how TINA can simplify your life and make the headaches of dealing with Windows network drives a thing of the past.