Document Tree
- Dr. Moria Levy
- Apr 1, 2001
- 3 min read
Over the years, the computer has become a central tool in our work. Ideas, proposals, specifications, and discussion summaries are all put in writing. A casual examination of the knowledge accumulated in employees' minds reveals that a significant portion of the knowledge stored in our heads relates to the very existence of documents and their location. However, one should not conclude from this that it is sufficient for all documents to be stored in one central location without the need for folders and subfolders. Document management must be user-friendly so that anyone working with it can easily navigate the sea of documents. Working with a structured document tree is a convenient way that allows people to navigate in a defined area among documents when they don't know exactly what they are looking for.
We build a document tree almost every day, whether using solutions for managing and navigating documents of their various types, or using the local disk or network. However, we often save a particular document in one folder and sometimes in another. Often, the tree is so deep that navigating it becomes too cumbersome.
Here are several tips that help in building an optimal document tree:
The document tree must be well-defined, so that at every stage of work, the employee who stores and accesses his documents will have an unambiguous definition of where he should store the documents (or search for them).
It should be ensured that every user working on their documents will not have to deal with more than three levels (or, in extreme cases, four levels) of the tree from their base. The base of every employee is defined as the highest meeting point from which they can get more than one option for storing information for a project. For example, a "Public Relations" folder can contain 3 levels, but it is still under the "Marketing" folder.
The tree should not be too wide. A simple guideline could be: you can see all the documents contained in a subfolder on one page.
The tree should not be too narrow. Suppose there are many subfolders, each containing a small number of documents, and the number of documents is expected to grow at a slow pace. In that case, it is recommended to consider merging all the subfolders into a single subfolder.
The document tree is primarily based on organizational characteristics. The way documents are grouped is based on the organizational characteristics - use them as input (see technological review). Another important input is the existing document tree in the file system.
In certain cases, a dilemma may arise between two important characteristics, for example, whether to save documents according to their departmental affiliation or their customer affiliation. In such a case, it is recommended to save all documents of their various types belonging to a specific customer under the customer folder. In this way, an employee can access all the information about a customer in one folder, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple folders from different departments, such as finding marketing materials alongside administrative documents related to the customer.
Subfolder names will be derived in most cases from the values of the characteristics. For example, under the "Customers" folder, the name of each subfolder will be a customer name, which is a value of the customer characteristic.
If there is importance to the order in which subfolders are displayed, you can add 2 digits to the folder name that define the order. It is recommended to start using numbers in jumps of ten. In this way, it will be easy to add folders between them in the future without too much effort.
If some of the subfolders need to be always at the top for quick access, you can add an underscore before the folder name. For example, "_Presentations".
After the design comes the building and testing phase, there are two ways to test the efficiency of the tree:
Storage of different types of documents while examining whether it is easy to decide where to store them.
Sending the structure to a representative group of people so they can try storing documents and examine how efficient it is for them.
So far, and now forward to work....
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