>Our city's division directors are interested in establishing a
>standardized file-naming convention for electronic files (Word, pdf,
>Excel, jpg, etc.)  We have no EDMS yet, though we are moving in that
>direction.  


Boy howdy, this is a loaded question.  And I'm thinking the answer this time
isn't "it depends" but instead it's NO.

I (and I'm sure many others) can sense your frustration, as we've all been
through some degree of this.  And you're proposing to go about it in the
right way, but it isn't an easy thing.   One thing that really popped out at
me was the variety of formats and the fact that naming conventions in some
cases are dependent upon what the applications allow... and also, the
concern for things like versions of the applications (MS Office has now
appended the "x" onto file names) which means you could potentially have two
distinctly different files:

Meeting Minutes October 2009.doc
Meeting Minutes October 2009.docx 

And if you have 20 divisions and 30 departments that prepare minutes... well
you get the picture.

Even if they're stored in different folders, when you move to an EDMS/ERMS
and you combine the content, this could wreak havoc on your records.

You have a couple of options, one being assign an alpha or numeric (2, 3 or
X characters) to each division, if that's the highest organizational level,
then a 'dash' and another alpha code (2, 3 or X characters) to each
department, if that's the next organizational level, and so on until you
have unique identifiers for each "organization", THEN you need to still come
up with an agreed upon naming convention that may or may not include the date.

Another option would be to use a payroll account or other identifier that
already exists for each of these organizations, THEN the naming convention.

And I'm sure the suggestions are like opinions, everybody has one... and
they all stink.  Oh... wait a minute, that's not OPINIONS, now what is it
that everybody has and they all stink?? Well, nevermind... you have enough
to deal with here Paul.

Larry
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And I can't wait until the first IT guy comes along and says, "Pshaw... you
don't have to do any of THAT... we can simply index everything and then you
can use FULL TEXT SEARCH and find whatever you want"  =)

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