How To Manage Hundreds of Thousands of Documents? 438
ajmcello78 writes "We're a mid-sized aerospace company with over a hundred thousand documents stored out on our Samba servers that also need to be accessed from our satellite offices. We have a VPN set up for the remote sites and use the Samba net use command to map the remote shares. It's becoming quite a mess, sometimes quite slow, and there is really no naming or numbering convention in place for the files and directories. We end up with mixed casing, all uppercase, all lowercase, dashes and ampersands in the file names, and there are literally hundreds of directories to sort through before you can find the document you are looking for. Does anybody know of a good system or method to manage all these documents, and also make them available to our satellite offices?"
Google to the rescue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just put everything up on a P2P server - then everyone can look for the documents at the same time as they are looking for their favourite Linux distro.
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I agree - although you might want to eventually implement a systematic method of naming/storing your documents.
The google appliance (or some other reasonably fast "WAN" search tool) would let you find files in the current rats nest "as is", making it easier to organize them to the new "standard".
Re:Google to the rescue? (Score:5, Insightful)
use your users, if you can. i'm just talking out my ass here, but i'd think it a not-too-difficult matter to add some sort of user input form along the lines of "hey, now that you've found the document you need, does the name fit the new naming scheme? if not, why not rename it so it fits!". this is assuming you can trust your userbase not to be asshats and to be able to follow the naming protocol.
Re:Google to the rescue? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google to the rescue? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now I actually LOL'd on that one!
Getting our userbase to actually give a flying fart about a naming protocol and then getting them to follow it!?
I won't be holding my breath for either of those two things to happen...
You obviously don't know how to motivate people. Tell your boss you can get everything renamed for $100/week. Then post a leader board showing who has renamed the most documents each week, and give each week's winner a gift certificate to a local restaurant. Don't let anyone win more than once a month, to prevent too much disruption of normal job duties, and set up some sort of meta-moderation to prevent gaming the system. (You could probably use slashcode out-of the-box, just make each document a story and suggest better names in the comments.)
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I agree - although you might want to eventually implement a systematic method of naming/storing your documents.
While this seems like a good idea on the surface, it never seems to work very well. Even verbose file names seem to fail miserably, as the first 100 or so letters are always the same (IE:"Project Tiger Sausage rocket module assembly - Ion injector harware part 1 ...>
... but so what.)
Then there is the problem of getting all the employees to fully understand directory structures. Just look at your workmates screens to see how many people save everything on their desktop. (Yes, really a windows problem
Re:Google to the rescue? (Score:4, Informative)
Google Appliance (Score:5, Informative)
Mac OS X Server - Spotlight Server (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Search Appliance is definitely what you want.
If you have a mid sized company you definitely don't have the surplus of highly talented systems administrator talent laying about to run one of the document management systems that others here are likely to suggest. Be very careful going down the document management server path. It's far, far more work than you think it will be, than the vendor will tell you it is. Not simply more work for you, but for your IT staff and your users, too.
The Google Search Appliance, by contrast, is "fire and forget". Plug it in. Turn it on. Patch it when Google suggests you do so. That's about it.
How not to do it (Score:4, Funny)
Store it on a single FAT32 partition and hope for the best. Only meant for people with guts or really really nice bosses.
Re:How not to do it (Score:5, Funny)
Pfft. This is a serious job. 320k floppies are what you want.
Or... you know... you could try managing those documents with a document management system.
Re:How not to do it (Score:5, Funny)
Answered your own question (Score:5, Insightful)
and there is really no naming or numbering convention in place for the files and directories.
I think you already know the answer.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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You can look also at OpenDMS [sourceforge.net]. It's not very active lately but might have a good core that you can expand on.
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LMAO ... Documentum is almost dead ... that's why they released V6.5 several months back and are on track to release V7 in H1'10.
Why don't you tell us all how your "competitor" company scales to tens of millions of documents with high availablity, disaster recovery, and content caching across 5 continents?
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One way or another the work is going to have to be done, the relevant question is how easily will it be maintained, how will it handled increases in size and how easily can it be backed up.
I'm doing this sort of thing right now with my digital images. Thankfully,
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otherwise you have to spend a lot of time getting all of the items into the database and properly tagged and sorted
Document clustering software can make that less painful by giving an overview of what you have (possibly hierarchical), and allowing you to categorize dozens (or even thousands) of related documents with a single mouse click. Blatant plug: Clustify [cluster-text.com].
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Yeah, some people mentioned Google appliances, which I suppose is a sort-of solution. I've never used one of those internally, but I wouldn't trust that to be the end-all solution to your organizational problems. What if there's a file that Google can't read or gather good metadata for? What if you're searching for common terms, and the file you're looking for is on the 75th page? What if you're not remembering the correct search parameters and so your file just isn't turning up in your searches?
There'
Re:Answered your own question (Score:5, Funny)
The most basic is dividing the images up according to hair color or the number of girls appearing in each photo. Then you usually divide them up between hardcore and softcore, type of performance, fetish, etc. For your favorites, you can keep a folder in the home directory, of course. I know this guy works for an aerospace company, but keeping track of 500,000+ files isn't rocket science! We've all been able to do that since the advent of the 200GB harddrive.
it's all about the index (Score:3, Informative)
The lack of a naming convention for the filenames and directories is neither here nor there. What matters is how well it's indexed.
Now I use naming conventions for my files (photos ,mp3s etc). Am i contradicting myself? No, it's because I don't have enough of them that I need a separate index.
Re:it's all about the index (Score:5, Interesting)
Very true. I'd take a look at DSpace [dspace.org] or Open Library [openlibrary.org] for examples of software designed to handle gigantic numbers of documents and maintain sensible indexes for them.
Google Search Appliance (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/ [google.com]
Alfresco or SharePoint (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Alfresco or SharePoint (Score:4, Interesting)
"You can now stand up an Alfresco Labs server next to a SharePoint Server, and Office will not be able to tell the difference between the two," said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. "But we are offering considerably more scale than SharePoint can deliver," he said.
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I have a personal bias, but I think IBM's FileNet [ibm.com] would solve this quite neatly. I've done implementations of it that are pretty much exactly what the OP describes.
Customer has a share that's gotten totally out of control, just stuffed full of files. They want to make them available across multiple offices, generally without getting into complex VPN crap, and also want to simplify management, add more security / compartmentalization, or integrate it with corporate SSI. All doable. Runs on your choice of
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Start with.... (Score:2)
Then if you can be bothered, you can start going through older files and updating the naming conventions or entering them into the Document management system of you choice...
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Use a cataloging system (Score:5, Interesting)
I happen to have written one:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/docdb-v/ [sourceforge.net]
could be what you are looking for. Of course, it'll take effort to catalog the documents.
SharePoint? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SharePoint? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.
Re:SharePoint? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.
No less proprietary than other similar systems. Getting files in/out of Sharepoint is a fairly trivial process, and the API is open enough to craft your own migration plan if you ever decide to move away from it, given that everything else is equally (or even more) proprietary than Sharepoint.
MS Office might be proprietary, but is so widespread that it's a 'standard' in its own right -- Sharepoint integrates excellently with Office, and keeps your users happy.
I'm typically not one to advocate the use of Microsoft products. However, Sharepoint worked just fine when I was using it, and is definitely a huge step up from any of the competing products at the same price-level.
Re:SharePoint? (Score:4, Informative)
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That's true of any other solution in the same manor as SharePoint. But at least the data is stored in a SQL database and not something proprietary like the MS Exchange information store.
Although the files are in a database you can change the view in the browser to be "explorer" and access the files using Windows File Sharing-like features (copy/paste) through the browser. This method of access though is an end-run around SharePoint's versioning system. New files can be uploaded in this manner as well. I presume that when you modify an existing document in this way that SharePoint just makes that version the newest one in the actual database. SharePoint is still no substitute for a properly
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What you say:
Why should you give sharepoint a chance? Even it it works well, it is proprietary and you are locked in.
What you mean:
Regardless of how perfect a solution might be for you, if it doesn't conform to MY personal ideological viewpoint, it shouldn't be given a chance.
God I hate people like you.
--AC
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Mod parent up. I helped create a tag-based document retrieval system for my former employer using SharePoint. It actually worked quite well.
Use the right tool for the job. It's got a nice interface (that's also very familiar-looking to most users), scales well, and integrates well with MS Office, which (like it or not) is used by 99.99% of the corporate world. It also handles non-office files just fine.
That's not to say that Unix-based solutions don't have their place. During the migration, I actually
SharePoint (Score:4, Informative)
I personally am ambivalent about SharePoint. Its roots are in document management, so it seems to do that relatively well. The publishing features are fairly nice as well. I don't think it's the best system for making web sites, but it may some day get there. Currently it feels like a 2.0 product (the magic rule is to never buy anything from Microsoft before 3.0).
There are gotchas. SharePoint is tightly coupled with your clients. If everyone accessing the documents are using the latest version of Office, you'll be okay. If not, you'll run into problems. You may also need to throw a lot of hardware into SharePoint, as storing files inside of SQL has some built-in inefficiencies.
Still, some of our users seem to love SharePoint, so it might be a good option for you.
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I'm no MS fanboy, but Sharepoint is great. I work for a large engineering company and we use it to organize blueprints, as well as pretty much all of our non-code documents. Even the most clueless HR-types can use it, and it's really not hard to set up.
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How does Sharepoint address his problem? It uses the exact same folder/file paradigm that is failing in his existing solution.
-Peter
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From the initial question, I'd guess that just WSS3 will get the job done and it's free. One important piece of this though is: plan your deployment. Figure out what type of site structure you plan to use before you implement anything. Sharepoint can be a wonderful tool, but if you just jump into it and let it grow organically you will end up hating it and yourself. And trying to monkey around with the site structure after the fact can be trouble. Oh and, get famil
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Cygnet (Score:2)
Cygnet ECM might work for you.
Documentum (Score:2, Interesting)
Just the doc, or collaboration? (Score:2)
If you need to use just plain documents, store then in on big directory, update the meta information.
Let people move links onto there system and organize the links how the like, but don't let them move the documents.
Think iTunes for documents. I loath that example since I have set this sort of thing long before iTunes came around.
If you on collaborative use of your documents get something like this:
Jive.com
Document management software (Score:5, Insightful)
Most print companies like Xerox have their own proprietary Document management [wikipedia.org] tools you can buy, and a bunch of CRM and ERP solutions (like OpenERP - it's free AND Open Source) provide some good simple document searching and indexing tools.
Really it comes down to how complex you want searching to be? Are there specific keys in the document you could index by? Do you require the full-text search capabilities of a Google search appliance?
A really good solution I've come across for some clients in Edmonton is Called MetalTrace [traceapps.com] by Trace Applications. Don't let the name fool you about the specificity, software like this can Scan, Index, and even read barcodes on all sorts of documents then let people search for it via the web. Their "killer-app" has multiple user-defined document types with multiple search fields, combined with some back-filing (digital and scanning) really saved the day.
Do your research though on "Document managment" and see what product best fits your needs. It's a really well established field so reinventing the wheel is a little masochistic... not that there's anything wrong with that. ;)
-Matt
Re:Document management software (Score:4, Insightful)
Most print companies like Xerox have their own proprietary Document management [wikipedia.org] tools you can buy
Document management software is great, but when you have enormous numbers of documents (100s of thousands like in the summary), it becomes necessary to have a content management system in place. Something that's intelligent enough to break the documents up into pieces and allow searches, but something more robust than full-text search.
We've been using this software called MarkLogic Server (http://marklogic.com). It's an XML database and has a content processing framework for document ingestion. So, basically, assuming that documents are structured similarly, they can be converted into XML so they can be queried with custom weights being applied to content in different portions of the document. The software has built-in Word support so it'll automatically convert .doc files with proper formatting as well as the ability to add custom handlers for other formats including plaintext.
We're currently managing a couple million documents and generating dynamic documents on the fly for some processes. Since on-the-fly documents may take time to generate, we have a system in place that saves the result in the database which can also be queried at a later date. It's all really cool.
Of course, there's a bit of a learning curve to writing your own software for it since it uses XQuery, but it's not much harder to learn than SQL, and so far, it seems to be far more powerful.
Disclaimer: I'm not a shill nor am I being paid in any way by MarkLogic... I'm just seriously blown away by what their technology has enabled us to do.
Knowledge Tree (Score:3, Informative)
Knowledge Tree? (Score:2)
I used an old version a while ago and it was pretty good then. Does versioning and other things.
http://www.knowledgetree.com/ [knowledgetree.com]
Get yourself a good management system. (Score:2, Informative)
While this may be an odd suggestion, here's two things:
1) Get yourself a damn good document or content management system. Get it set up on the baddest machines you can afford.Overshoot the capability you need, so that you have room to grow.
2) Get a librarian to look at the kinds of documents you create, and develop a system to catalog documents while maintaining reasonable standards for file names. As the super simplest system, maybe document names that indicate (at a minimum) what project or what overhead
Lots of ECM solutions out there... (Score:2, Informative)
Switch to Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
I only partly jest, I know such a thing is damn near impossible to actually do, but in our Mac shop, such things are trivial. With one click of the mouse we enable spotlight searching on our Leopard AFP server and bam... all the clients have almost instantaneous search access to their docs.
nothing beats a folder structure and naming (Score:2, Insightful)
WebDav (Score:4, Informative)
If you users are naming their files with strange characters in them (assuming it's not due to Samba) then they will just have to live with it, you won't have time to sort out all the wierd names that (mostly MS-Word) users give to their filenames. The primary objective should be to give your users access to the files. Making the directory listing pretty ought to be a secondary concern.
Alfresco (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.alfresco.com/index-b2.html [alfresco.com]
Mindoka Technology Corp. (Score:2)
Mindoka (http://www.mindoka.com) has a document management product that is designed to solve the problem that you have.
FileNet (Score:5, Interesting)
This is more of a rant at this point, but it is a stop-gap solution that allows people to continue to use outdated business processes storing important data in image formats or in documents scattered about with minimal indexing/search capabilities, rather than analyzable "data" that can lead to "information." I always take the position that if the goal is something on paper, or the goal is to store something that "was" on paper, it is time to rethink the business process to see if we can automate it, or store/present the data electronically in the first place. The old school fights against it, but no one has ever been able to say it wasn't more efficent in the end and enabled IT to say "yes we can" when the next great idea came along versus "here is a stack of papers, figure out $trend."
Technical issues aside (Score:3, Insightful)
Hire a document manager / clerk person who will create order. Your engineers won't.
Just Don't Use Livelink (Score:2)
Can't really suggest a good document management program but I can tell you one to avoid. We use Livelink at my place of work and its indexing and search capabilities are horrible (some would say non-existent). For example every document added to Livelink gets a document number assigned to it. One would expect to be able to retrieve that document by using the same document number but if you enter it into the search bar Livelink returns no results found. Huh? Not to mention some odd UI behaviours like when
Institutional repository? (Score:2)
What kind of documents are they? If they're mostly text and you want versioning, the only drawback to subversion is getting people to learn the tools, but that might be too much.
If they're archival/static documents, an institutional repository could work. Something like DSpace isn't that hard to deploy and will provide basic archival and search features.
The middle ground between those two solutions is probably what you want, though. Everyone I work with uses SharePoint for that, and I hate recommending prop
Laserfiche (Score:2, Informative)
It's called a DAM system. Do some research. (Score:2)
Digital Asset Management
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=digital+asset+management [lmgtfy.com]
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Well, maybe he doesn't want your DAM system!
Organize.... (Score:2)
Who else read this and thought... (Score:2, Interesting)
Who else read this and thought... working in a satellite office for an aerospace company would involve a lot of cool travel perks?
-- Terry
Odd that the next story... (Score:3, Informative)
Odd that the next story has a great idea for document management right in the summary...
Hadoop!
Sharepoint (Score:2)
...seems like a natural solution for your connectivity issues, or perhaps whatever the open source variety of Sharepoint is. You really do need to tackle the naming convention question though. You can have all the file indexing you want, but sometimes a nice, logical, clean file name will get you what you're after much faster than any kind of searching.
It's going to be horrible, painful, thankless work that will put you on the shit list of just about every department manager and administrative assistant ("Y
Good luck (Score:2)
I kicked in and wrote an app that generated a web list on the fly and had clickable links so the documents could be examined and then marked as part of discovery.
I also brought in three
New Hire. (Score:2)
On the plus side, you also get to hire a librarian. nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.
Alfresco of course! (Score:3, Interesting)
It can scale extremely well. It is the backend to Adobe's acrobat.com website! So you know it can handle millions of documents if you need it to. Sharepoint requires MS SQL Server for searching documents. With Alfresco, that feature is built in.
Sharepoint is teaming software and not really designed for large document repositories. Alfresco has a teaming interface (Alfresco Share) and a more generic document repository interface.
Alfresco can expose the repository via FTP, SMB, WebDAV, and a web client interface.
WIKI (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a right way. (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system [wikipedia.org]
For that level of documentation you need to have a staff and get it properly indexed. You need a high level librarian. This would be someone with a masters degree at minimum in library science and at least a bachelors in information technology. They will not come cheap and they are a long term investment. The software is available, it is not trivial. Hiring a large number of people to recategorize and tag all the documents for the length of time that takes is also an expense but worth it. Once it's all in place maintaining it gets much easier.
I've seen a system developed for Raytheon. They took all the old compartmentalized data Hughes had and put every scrap of paper through a scanner. It was exceptionally well done. This would display electronic files and would have the location of hard copy. Classified documents were in some cases indexed but were hard copy only afaik. There were some documents that were hard copy only, those were usually ones with an NDA or other restriction on making electronic copies. It had every thing mentioned wrt versioning and such. Documents spanned decades with hundreds of revisions and you could pull up and view any revision. Depending on how recent and what type of document you could view a change log. Older scanned ones did not have that unless they'd been important enough to reenter as modern documents which meant OCR or manually transcribed. Some schematics were reentered into the system in a modern format. The effort was worth it. Having that data is the only way some devices or parts could be made or repaired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system [wikipedia.org]
DMS vs. Repository (Score:3)
I'm surprised that there were quite a few programs not mentions on the DMS wikipedia page -- People might consider them to be more as repository software than DMS (or RMS), but some other ones to mention that would be useful to managing already existing documents:
And if you're looking for librarians with an IT background, in the libraries they're called "Systems Librarians". You might also check out the oss4lib [oss4lib.org] and code4lib [code4lib.org] communities.
Old tech (Score:3)
It's called an index or a bibliography. There exists a profession known as 'librarian' specifically trained in the creation of such and in the management of large numbers of documents.
Oracle or Alfresco (Score:2)
Google is the answer (Score:2)
Google?
http://www.google.com.au/enterprise/mini/index.html [google.com.au]
Seriously, if you can't be bothered collecting/maintaining the metadata that more structured solutions require, then just let Google index the lot. It'll work just as well (or not) as it does on the Internet. Although its not free it seems reasonably priced. It could be a quick answer to your problem.
Start with the WAN (Score:2)
A good example is Cisco WAAS, a cool video showing how it works is here: http://www.cisco.com/cdc_content_elements/flash/ans/index.html [cisco.com]
See here for data sheets and specs: http://www [cisco.com]
DMS (Score:2)
DMS -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system [wikipedia.org]
LaserFiche (Score:2)
We're using a Win3.1 app called LaserFiche on XP with > 250,000 documents and it's lightning fast, works with TIFF files and PDF and probably more. Includes file and folder permissions.
Thunderstone (Score:2)
The big guys use... (Score:2)
Garbage In Garbage Out (Score:5, Informative)
It's becoming quite a mess, sometimes quite slow, and there is really no naming or numbering convention in place for the files and directories. We end up with mixed casing, all uppercase, all lowercase, dashes and ampersands in the file names, and there are literally hundreds of directories to sort through before you can find the document you are looking for.
Slow. Upgrade your network and VPN. You know that VPN layer is just killing your performance.
No naming or numbering convention. Get one.
Mixed casing. Learn How to Properly Case Folders (and documents).
Dashes and ampersands. Are they a problem? Aesthetically unpleasant? I personally restrict punctuation in a filesystem to dashes, periods, and parenthesis (unless the punctuation is a replicable part of the name of the file/folder).
Examples:
01 - The First Track (vocal)
02 - $lashhvertisements Attack!
03 - Where Have All the A.C.'s Gone
Develop your own method that works and be obsessed about it to the point where you would reburn a disc if one of the filenames was "01-Name" instead of "01 - Name".
Hundreds of directories.
Each file should have it's own folder.
"That's insane!" you say. Start out with this mentality. If there is no reason at all to separate two files (they are part of the same thing) then place them in one folder, and make sure the folder is named all-encompasingly. Repeat for all files. If you get into a AB, BC, but not ABC situation, the solution is to have A and B and C, with A and C linking to B with your choice of shortcut/link/symlink/etc.
Do this until all files are in folders. Then repeat with folders.
There is NO substitute for organization and getting people on the same page. Develop some conventions. Task people to fix as they go. Check up to make sure people accessing documents are fixing as they go, and doing so according to convention. Once people are used to the convention, and once things are relatively organized, they won't ever need to search again. They'll instantly know where 99% of things are, and will be able to dig around and find anything else within seconds.
The main problem you face is getting organized after already being unorganized. It isn't easy, but at least you're not dealing with millions of paper documents.
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By "replicable part of the name of the file/folder" I mean in regards to illegal characters in the filesystem/os. Windows claims these are ><\/:|*^?" for example (dunno if it's Windows, NTFS, NTFS+FAT+Whatever else windows needs to support).
I didn't intend to do an example with /. references when I started. I wanted something showing the dollar sign, and then stuff with periods and a quote mark and a question mark (dropped). First stuff that came to mind. Had I planned it, or previewed my post, th
Obviously (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hummingbird Document management (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hummingbird Document management (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but it's not that hard to find someone. But Hummingbird (now owned by Open Text) or any other Document Management System. You've got a bunch of documents. You need to manage them. Ergo, a document management system.
Parent makes an excellent point, however: the single most critical component of a successful implementation is to get a skilled* consultant who can work with you to properly define the taxonomy. Everything else flows from there.
* If you go with Hummingbird DM, "skilled" means "not one of their over priced professional services people". They're dreadful.
Re:Hummingbird Document management (Score:4, Insightful)
Skilled consultants are great but without training employees you'll keep on paying big $ for consultants whenever there's a change to make. Let the consultant show how and let the employees do the work. BTW: We have 3000+ users (all happy) on their system and no consultant.
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Or better yet talk to people who've done it before. I mean seriously there have been organizations managing hundreds of thousands of documents since the Roman Era, its nothing new.
Re:Google wave (Score:5, Funny)
"[O]rganizations managing hundreds of thousands of documents since the Roman Era,"
You mean The Vatican? I doubt that "small aerospace company" could afford to staff up on monks and monasteries.
Re:Google wave (Score:5, Funny)
monks work for free, they just need food and enlightenment, and if you get lucky they fast and then only need the enlightenment aspect.
Re:Google wave (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest your company look at hiring a library sciences major, since this is what they do.
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>> windows Terminal Server licenses aren't too expensive and the remote desktop experience is silky smooth.
BWAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Thanks for that. I needed a laugh. Silky smooth? Having to do anything remotely technical via Terminal Server is the biggest pain in the butt I've ever experienced.
BTW if you're really not a paid shill for Microsoft then WTF are you smoking?
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Our documentation is not nearly as bad as the OP's, but when I considered an approach to wrangling this mess into a usable state, Wiki was the first thing that came to mind. Wikipedia seems to work pretty well, and supports thousands of users all over the place. Couldn't be _that_ bad, could it?