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This is the sort of thing I do as a job.
But approach is very dependent on how big the organisation is in terms of people + docs, rate of change etc, existing access to/budget for tools (like tagging, doc management systems), ability/willingness of staff to use them, metadata requirements, etc.
Not sure I can say much more because I don't know how big the problem is, but it does sound like you are jumping ahead a bit.
I'd suggest taking a step back and write down what the actual issues are (frustrations, time/cost sinks, failures to provide files to pitches meaning lost potential business, etc). Not just yours, get them from a cross section of people to make sure you get them from the people who are suffering. (It sounds like you might be the boss, and if so, you might not be the person best placed to get honest feedback).
Once you have a list, deduplicate and put them in some order of importance, with consensus from the same people. Seeing a nice neat hierarchy of files will probably be near the bottom...
Then start thinking about actual requirements.
Oh, if there's a quick answer, it's to find out what your closest competitor does, whether it works, and if so, copy it.
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chez_jay
Question for people with common sense and maybe some IT nous.
I'm wanting to give our drives a spring clean - looking for best practices on folder structure, filesystem hierarchy etc from the top down. Needs to cater for:
Management stuff (staff stuff, website masters, branding, various logos and assets,
Finance stuff (tax, payroll, banking, accounts, receipts etc)
Legal and contract stuff (both for clients and freelancers/employees)
Development stuff (i.e. pitching and proposals, case studies)
Client stuff (actual work - documents only, raw video and project files are stored locally on RAID)
Common issues:
Should client docs be on a project by project basis within the client folder? What about assets shared between projects?
What happens with pitches when they get signed? I.e. move folder to client directory? Leave as is?
We use Google Drive and create stuff with google docs/sheets etc - some clients share this practice, others use MS Office so we end up with various duplicates in Docx, PDF and GDoc form. Retain these? Delete them? We usually share google docs links while we're working on them. We usually send final docs to client as PDFs as standard unless they ask for docx versions.
Is there a way with Google Drive (working on MacOS) to set a default location for new file creations OTHER than the top directory? Currently every time we open up Sheets or Docs or whatever it automatically saves it in the top directory and we have to move it to the corresponding client folder which is a faff, albeit a small one.
Is there a way using Google Drive and MacOS to see previews of documents in Finder? I.e. I can see a preview of a .numbers or even a .xlsx file but not a .sheet - presume that's unlikely to change any time soon - should I switch everyone to PixelBooks (only half joking)
Would also like to revisit naming conventions for files - been a really busy year and frankly we've all (myself included) been sloppy about naming things - i.e. starting Obviously a naming convention is only useful if people follow it but if I'm going to be stricter on getting people to do so I'd like to have some confidence that I'm asking people to follow the right one.
Does anyone have some good reading material/links to go over? Or experiences of pitfalls etc.
Can someone just do this for me? kthanxbai