Stephanie,

> Has anyone out there who only keeps electronic copies of documents but
does not use document management software?  Has anyone tried to store their
companies reports in an organized fashion on a file server?  Did it work out
alright or was it a mess? <

File system-based low-cost (< USD1000) RM systems /can/ work in my
experience.  I have an article on this due for publication in the next RMS
(of Great Britain) Bulletin.  Basically, commercial ERMS systems are
expensive because they comprise two main expensive components – the back-end
RDBMS (eg. Oracle, SQL Server) which is a complicated bit of software; and
the end-user application screens (GUI or Web-based) which are expensive
because a lot of design and programming effort goes into them.

However, if your company uses Microsoft’s NTFS (NT file system), this will
enable your IT people to set up a folder structure with appropriate
permissions in place of the RDBMS.  I would then use the InteRM application
from ACS (see http://www.termtree.com.au/) to set up a metadata attribute to
contain the name of the mine to which a document refers, backed by a
drop-down list, so users don’t even get a chance to spell names incorrectly.
InteRM not only prompts users for required and optional metadata when a
document is saved, but incorporates an efficient search mechanism which lets
you search your folder structure for documents containing specified values
in specific metadata fields (such as mine name, author, date, subject,
keywords and even retention class).  It works via the standard and
user-defined metadata attributes (which arise from the use of NTFS) which
can be accessed through the File | Properties menu option in MS Office
applications.  The drawback is that InteRM only works as yet with MS Office
documents, and not formats like PDF.

InteRM’s companion product TermTree can be used to design a File Plan, then
produce an executable which can be run on any number of machines to create a
folder structure matching the File Plan.

Regards,

Bob

  >>>>>Bob Bater<<<<<
>>Principal Associate<<
>>InfoPlex Associates<<
  >>>>Bristol, UK<<<<

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