"Staff at my company are unable to open files on shared drives because those files are buried within sub-folders that exceed the 256 directory path limit. My company is in the commercial real estate sector, and there are complex digital folder filing systems for the Legal and Development departments (for example), given the nature of their work. As I think through ways of simplifying organization (tagging and metadata are good options), but it's complicated without a document management system, so I am open to any suggestions), I'm curious if others have encountered this technology issue?"
Happy Friday, Elizabeth,
I have encountered path limitations, and I too work in real estate, I have found a good rule of thumb is no more than two levels in from root level in shared drives, I have reconfigured a portion of my firms' active project folder/sub folder levels to fit within a three level configuration (that is Root or main level with no more than two sub levels in from there....) It is usually at that sub-sub level where long document names cause the snafu......sometimes if you email the document to yourself you can access and/or move inaccessible files a level or two up and the document usually becomes accessible at a higher level, if that can be accomplished then just give that doc a shorter name. In the case of recreating the folders names while giving individual docs in a given sub folder hierarchy a simple date as a minimal doc identifier (year/mm/date), as a basic but not necessarily an exact example for limiting characters, I have found if I reconfigure my documents in folder groupings the individual naming is less crucial because my folder name is controlling how you can find what you are looking for; and also might help to invest in an OCR engine that can further alleviate the need of naming docs descriptively, although OCR isn't 100% accurate...there are engines that can be pointed at shared drives over a period of time to catch up and then set to OCR all new documents added, this in theory might be worth checking into, but the surest way I have found is limiting subfolders by users or at least suggesting that they follow such edict. It may take you actually going into to sub-sub-sub levels and consolidating higher if functionally feasible.
Hope this helps!
PS - If you care to discuss more offline, email me directly, I'd be more than happy to share some of my basic RE folder/category templates.
Good Luck!
Ralph
Ralph B. Cooper
Records Manager
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