I too encountered the same dilemma Julie wrote about. In that company, I 
also found that they had difficulty accessing documents in heavily nested 
folder structures. Integrity of the folder/tree structure is good down to 
about 10 levels. A few of the people there had folders nested 15-25 levels 
down, with pretty much each document having its own folder. Folder names 
were very long, document names were also long (usually almost the same as 
its folder name) plus the heavy nesting created a perfect storm of what 
appeared to be lost files at first. The instigators then went to other 
places like thumb drives to re-create and re-save their work only to 
compound the problem. With  support from IT we found that one should never 
go more than 10 levels down in a folder tree structure and that Windows 
can only handle a certain number of characters from root directory down to 
the document in the most nested folder. I can't remember the actual 
character count. Our solution was to map a drive to start part way down 
the tree to access the records and relocate them to a better location. 

Stephen Cohen, Records Manager
MetLife \ Legal Affairs
1095 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY  10036-6796
212-578-2373
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"Julie Fleming" <[log in to unmask]> 
Sent by: "Records Management Program" <[log in to unmask]>
10/13/2009 08:23 PM
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Subject
Re: electronic file naming conventions?






There may be another area to consider when developing your naming 
conventions, and that is the length of the file name.  When you add all 
the codes and department names to the file name, along with the various 
levels of the hierarchy, you may run into issues with file names being 
too long for the applications to handle them.  I ran up against this 
issue once when developing a taxonomy and our document management 
system began giving us error messages because Microsoft Word could not 
handle the length of the file name.  Just a thought to add to the 
mix....

Julie Ann Fleming, CRM

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