I am working with the adminstrative offices of our international operations 
group to organize their SharePoint site. The main admin offices are in California 
and the SP site is currently hosted in Australia. They are using what they have 
described as the "free" version of SharePoint 2007. They have 10 regional 
administrative offices around the world, only four of which use English as a 
native language (there are administrators in each office that speak English 
though). Each of the offices serve multiple countries.

I am going through an exercise with them to develop a file plan (we're not 
even touching the retention schedule yet!). They presently have documents in 
a two-level plan with a folder for an activity loosely geared to functions. For 
example, they have a folder for legal, another for risk, another for trademark 
(to me risk and trademark are sub-activities of the legal function, but they 
have them as a single level). Then subfolders for each country. 

There are some documents that may apply to all countries, some that may 
apply to one, and some that may apply to multiple, but not all countries. One 
of the problems they are having now is that a single document may be copied 
into each of the country folders that it applies to, and someone may go back 
and update one document, but not even realize that others exist.

We discussed setting up a more traditional 3 or 4 level functional plan and 
using metadata to identify which county the document belongs to, but there 
may be access and hosting issues where employees in one country should not 
be able to see documents belonging to employees of another, or that some 
documents must be housed in the country that requires the documents.

I was trying to see if there was some clear delineation where "these" types of 
documents apply to all countries and "those" types will be region or country 
specific, but there didn't seem to be one.

Using metadata may be an issue as well since not all the offices use English. 
We were thinking about just making sure that the country metadata field was 
entered using the 3-character ISO country abbreviations, but in the case of 
the Asian countries, their computers don't even have roman characters. 

Using serach is similarly questionable because the documents are posted in the 
native language. We sometimes get translations, but the native language 
version is always the official copy.

So now that you've heard my sad tale, my question is how do other companies 
that have international oversight groups develop their file plans? Can you give 
me some ideas or examples of how you've dealt with some of these issues?


Nolene Sherman
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