Realistically, I know that many of my coworkers will continue to open last year’s draft document, change a few of the details and begin their creation from that type of “template”. Following a naming convention that lets people realize what they have when a document arrives in email or is found in a shared folder (where it doesn’t belong) might not be a bad idea
While there is a lot of freely available information online related to electronic document naming conventions, most (if not all) of these best practices and guidelines come from educational institutions, governments, records and information management organizations, and other non-profit/public sector institutions
The combination of their well-designed folder hierarchy, an intelligent naming convention and SharePoint’s workflow capability has enabled us to rapidly move several hundred reports into SharePoint libraries and set enough metadata columns to render truly useful results
But unfortunately file path is only really helpful in this way if you’re looking at companies who are well organized and practice good document hygiene in their naming conventions and file paths
Isn’t that what happens when organizations allow end users to organize and maintain records and information without management controls or naming conventions? A simple taxonomy appears to be a more reliable approach to tagging electronic records
Consider that all of the user profile information, project posts, and chat, as well as the associated artifacts from this community portal are sitting in a proprietary database and/or written to a file system using proprietary indexing schemes and naming conventions. But also consider that most of the leading suppliers of these Social Business Software tools are smaller firms (5 to 50 employees)
Whether it is featured overload, particular naming conventions that do not make sense to the users, we run the risk of drastically limiting a collaborative solution's effectiveness, by engaging in a discovery process to learn more about our audience
For others – the people who have been merrily developing all kinds of “unique” SharePoint repositories, naming conventions and applications with no real “owner” - the idea of information governance is more of a buzz kill
Guidelines for Metadata and general naming conventions allow an institution to be creative without getting lost
By having set rules to enforce where content is stored, how folder and file naming convention are applied, how data is formatted, and which document types are allowed, you will ensure that storing documents in SharePoint does not simply become an electronic filing cabinet—without business rules for organizing the information