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Moving from personal to organisational directory structures

By Lasa Information Systems Team

When an organisation moves from having standalone PCs to either a peer-to-peer network with one machine dedicated to storing the files or a client server network, one of the things that will need to be done is to move all the existing files from the individual PCs to the dedicated PC or server. This might not be as easy as it sounds!

For the purposes of this article, let’s imagine a typical small organisation which:

• Runs an advice service for clients
• Has several outreach projects for the elderly and children
• Has a membership
• Publishes a regular newsletter
• Has a volunteer board
• Keeps a “library” of electronic resource materials
• Has its own website
• Has a director, 4 members of staff and a part-time finance worker

Example 1 – Peer-to-peer network with a PC set to share files

The organisation has recently moved from having standalone PCs to a network and want to make it easier to back up their files by storing them all on a shared drive on one of the organisation’s PCs. When users have their own PC they will usually arrange their files as they see fit –depending on their idiosyncrasies, organisational and computer skills.

Since Windows 95, a folder called My Documents has been the default location for storing files – the knowledgebase article Good Housekeeping deals with this and how to create folders and sub folders to make things easier.

The first job which needs doing is moving all the existing files from the individual machines to the file server. The temptation when moving from dispersed to centralised file storage is to keep everything as it is. You create folders with staff names and shift the files across the network to the shared drive. Simple. However, given that one of the reasons for having a network is file sharing, this may not make it easy for other members of staff to find files easily. How will the Director, for example, know who is keeping the files on the outreach projects when it’s the shared responsibility of two members of staff? This is one reason why an organisational folder system is useful.

Several reasons exist:

• It is a more logical way of storing documents
• It makes it easy to share files
• Saving and finding files is more straightforward
• If all files are stored on one machine in one place then they can be backed up easier
• You don’t end up with several versions of the same document on different drives
• It helps the organisation comply with Data Protection legislation

There are a number of ways of approaching this project – it is a project to arrange your files and it will need planning. You could have a go at sorting this out at a staff team meeting. Sit down with a piece of paper and list all the different areas of work that you hold information on – typically they will include:

• Finance
• Personnel
• Correspondence – general and specific
• Membership records (maybe a database)
• Case records
• Newsletters
• Information resources
• Staff meeting minutes
• Board meeting agendas and minutes
• Project work
• Team work
• Web pages

And so on… you get the idea. This starts to give us the bare bones of a structure for organising the files in folders. Let’s take Finance to start with, as an example. We need a folder called, er, finance, for starters. Under that we will perhaps want to have subfolders for different financial years. We then want subfolders for budgets, cashflows, for payment records. So we have something that looks like:

• Finance
  
• 2002/2003
• Cashflows
• Budgets
• Payments
  
• 2003/2004
• Cashflows
• Budgets
• Payments

What about resources? The organisation gathers all sorts of stuff from email attachments, the web, Acrobat files. How about (examples only):

• Resources
  
• Health
• Reproductive
• Male
• Female
• Smoking
• Cessation Programmes
• Substitutes
• Drugs
• Medicinal
• Street
• Recreational
• Eating
• Obesity
• Anorexia
• Welfare Benefits
• Housing
• Children
• Maternity

In addition you probably want to have a shared folder for organisational resources like letter and memo templates, time sheets, stationery order forms, petty cash claim forms, that sort of thing.

Lastly, staff will want to have their own area for documents which are personal – they might want to keep these on their own C: drives, but they do so at their own risk in that they are responsible for backing them up.

Windows allows password protecting of folders so that there is a minimal level of security – this is fairly straightforward under Windows 98 and more complicated under Windows 2000 and XP. Briefly, in Windows 98, after turning file sharing on for the PC you can just add a password to the folder sharing property - see this Windows Networking article for an example of how to do this.

Windows 2000 and XP are more secure - you need to set up staff as users of the PC (under Settings, Control Panel, User Accounts or Users and Passwords) and then apply security permissions to the individual folders (right click on the folder and bring up Properties) by adding the appropriate users to that folder.

More information on sharing folders under Windows XP in this Practically Networked article.

Use drive mapping so that you can connect to a shared folder without having to navigate through Network Neighbourhood or My Network Places. A folder can be given a virtual drive letter – you might want to use S for shared for example. In that way when it comes to saving documents the S drive will appear in the list of system drives along with A, C, D etc. You might also want to set up Word and Excel to use the mapped drive as the default location for saving files rather than My Documents on the C drive – this is easily done through Tools > Options > File Locations > Documents.

Example 2 – Network with a server

In this scenario the organisation has recently moved from having standalone PCs to a network and has a server installed.

The server takes the place in the example above of the shared PC.  Generally the same processes will need to be carried out, but the server provides a much higher level of security as to who can access the folders. The server administrator needs to apply the permissions – training is necessary for someone new to server admin.

The staff team still needs to decide who has access to which folders. This is, of course, not set in stone, staff can be added and removed as necessary but it helps to have some sort of plan. For example, the finance worker and the director probably both need access to the Finance folder, but only the director to the Personnel files. If there’s a management team then they can share certain folders that only they need access to and so on.

Remember that it is not just a question of confidentiality, but also of security – if an inexperienced user wanders into an area where they shouldn’t be and accidentally deletes files it could be problematic.  Security protects you against this as much as it does against malicious hackers - who in reality are much less likely to be wandering around your network. Folder names are visible to anyone with access to the server but they won’t be able to open or save documents to the folder unless they have the relevant permissions. Folders or sub folders can be made read only to certain users so that changes to documents cannot be made – you may want staff to be able to see the staff handbook information but not be able to alter it.

It is good practice to set up a few virtual drives (see drive mapping above) – your network contractor who’s setting up the sever can do this for you. On a server you might have three mapped folders - letters allocated here are arbitrary:

• G: Company – where the organisation stores all its work files (finance, personnel, projects etc.)
• S: Shared – templates, forms, resources, staff handbook, temporary files such as Antivirus updates etc.
• U: Users – personal documents (each staff user has their own specific folder which can only be seen by them)

Hints and tips

Agree on naming conventions for files and be consistent in using that convention. If you have a “Board meetings” folder and a sub folder called “Minutes” and under that “2003” there’s not much point in naming a file “Board meeting minutes 3 July 2003” when something more abbreviated would do. However, ensure that files that are misfiled (it happens!) can be identified relatively easily.

Avoid using “miscellaneous” folders – they will just end up with all sorts of odd stuff that needs sorting out later. Instead, try to file everything appropriately – if it doesn’t fit into a folder then perhaps the folder you want is missing so create a new one (you might need some sort of system to request new folders so that things don’t get out of hand).

Another thing to avoid is using the term New in filenames - a time will always come when a newer version of the file comes along, and having New2, New3 etc isn't very helpful.  Do mark final versions of a file as Final however - and stick to it!  If a more final version of the file becomes available rename the old one so it doesn't say final - if someone finds a file marked final they will not look for one marked final 2!

There is nothing worse than opening folders which are empty and finding all the files you would expect to find in them in a long list below them. Think of it in terms of your filing cabinets – you’d not be happy if everybody just chucked their papers in the bottom of the filing cabinet drawer without filing it in a folder – how would you find it again?

Make sure existing staff are given training in the new file management systems and that new staff receive induction so that they know where to find and file documents. It may well be worth producing a short manual to assist staff, or creating a page on the company intranet if you have one.  Set out clearly your conventions and who is allowed to make new folders, when and where.

Your ICT Induction Manual (see the knowledgebase article ICT Induction Manual) may also need to contain guidelines on user responsibilities with regard to file management. Check on legal requirements for how long electronic documents, including emails, must be stored.

Back up your data!

This cannot be stressed enough – the best folder structures in the world aren’t worth much if the hard drive fails and you don’t have a recent back up. Make a back up policy and stick to it.