Built on Collaboration

Something our sales guys get asked in nearly every meeting is "Can you replicate our file and folder structure?" The answer is "Yes, but we have 5,600 projects with thousands of organizations taking part. 99.9% of them don't use this set up."

At this point there are usually a few raised eyebrows and a grumble or two. But, when you think about it, using a file and folder structure within an online document management tool just doesn't make sense. Thankfully (on the Aconex system at least) keyword searching has made it redundant.

An analogy that comes to mind is to compare the Google search engine to the way the internet used to be. If you can remember searching using the original Compuserve, AOL and Yahoo! applications, you had to go all the way down a tree of folders, starting very wide, until you found what you were looking for. For example, if looking for information on Picasso. you would have to ascertain whether it would be held in the Entertainment folder or under Culture. You would then need to find The Arts, then Artists, then Painters, and then scroll until you found Picasso. Would we do that now? Of course not! We'd just tap "Picasso" into Google and wait for the results to appear, knowing the best matches would be near the top.

It's exactly the same with online document management systems that offer keyword search. Why would you go through five levels of folders (and who would define the levels across your whole project anyway?) to find electrical drawings, when you can punch the word "electrical" into the search bar and get the files you need in seconds, sorted as you want them to appear? Effectively, a folder structure is still there, it's just behind the scenes.

As with the evolution of web-browsers, being able to search on meta data is far quicker than using a folder structure and it also clears up the inevitable confusion (and disagreements) over naming and categorization.

Also, as with the evolution of web-browsers, once they get past "but this is how we always do things", very few people can imagine going back.

Labels: Good practice, Technology