Best way to organize documents

[tonynoriega]

ok, i have been tasked by my IT dept to re-organize a section on our Intranet that houses about 200+ PDF documents for the IT/IS Dept.

They are documents such as Korn Shell Scripting to how to Create a User Accounton on W2k3 Server... and everything else in between.

the current page just has some simple <ul><li>document</li>..... lists developed, with some headers segregating each section.

the page, when printed is 6 pages long, so you can imagine how long it is to scroll and find the document you are searching for....

there is a veritas search function, but doesnt work very well..

SO... i need to come up with a new layout, easier to navigate, easier to find the documents...etc... just make it "easier"

doesnt have to be pretty as this is in our Intranet, and these are IT/IS folks.. who have no desire for the "designer" in me to come out...

there is about 12 categories i need to account for....

what do you think is my best option to design this file structure?

should i:

- create pages for each section, create a bread crumb trail for each section and sub section, and display each of the PDF's according to their pages...

i.e. Index > Client Server > Log Files.pdf

- create some hidden divs for each category and have the sub categories appear, then one more hidden div and have the documents appear? thus keeping everything on the same page, just in a compact expandable format...?

obvioulsy not a difficult task, just checking to see if anyone has had success or failure in trying to structure so many documents for one departement in a logical manner.

[phranque]

a good information architecture to support those documents should provide helpful relevance signals, but you may also want to consider adding meta information to your pdf documents.
this may also make your search work better if your search engine is able to crawl and index the pdf meta information.

[bill]

Filenames and folders are so 20th century. ;)
Adding meta-data and improving search seems like a much better way of handling things. Make the data discoverable, don't lock it into a rigid architecture. Add appropriate tags, categories, keywords and/or other meta-data to the files. Then you can present the data in a number of easily accessible formats. Think tag clouds, category sorting, etc. Static lists are not nearly as useful.

[tonynoriega]

alot of these documents are already created.. does that matter?

and this Veritas search engine is horrible.... its not user friendly or administrator friendly...

and i just went through the rest of the documents and found a bunch of word documents as well...

...which i will have to convert to PDF ...

stupid question, but how do you add the meta information you stated...?

im assuming its not like HTML meta tags?

also, i think that these word documents are there for the IT/IS team to edit and fill out.. how would i make the pdfs with editable fields for them to fill out... can i do that in acrobat 7.0?

[bill]

alot of these documents are already created.. does that matter?

No. It was my assumption you were working with existing files.

stupid question, but how do you add the meta information you stated...?

That can depend on the file-type. For example, Word docs and PDF files have properties available that allow you to add all sorts of meta-data. You could write a macro that could go through entire directories and add meta data en masse.

Your problem sounds like it will be on the retrieval end. I have no experience with the SE you're using. You may need to look for something more flexible.

pdfs with editable fields

You can add interactive form fields that allow for data entry. You'd have to check the help menu for your version as I don't have a copy that old.

[phranque]

i know exiftool has a perl api for appending meta data to pdf files.
they also have a command line tool for win and mac, but i don't know if it works well for batch operations.

[tonynoriega]

i think i could get very deep in this document management aspect, which is not my forte... thats for the programmers... i just manage the content on the site(s).

im done with programming.

what i want is for the IT/IS departement to have a user friendly, easily understandable way of finding the documents they need in their departamental section of the Intranet.

and now that i look at the current page, 99% of these documents are .doc becuase they need to be filled out and submitted... and that is about as easy as you can get for their purposes...

remember, most of these people who access these docs are network engineers, tech support, network admins, *nix admins....etc...

which is why the page currently looks like a novell file directory structure i remember learning about in the early 90's...

i have come to 1 ideas....

i have a real nice 3 level flyout CSS menu i.e.:

Department: > Forms > Form1
Admin > Form2
Policies > Form3
Standards > Form4

keeping the page compact, and as the user maneuvers through the flyout the path that they are taking is highlighted, so they know where they are. i am keeping it 3 levels as i think that beyond that people get lost...

i am also looking at the Verity (sorry for previous spelling) search engine and realized that for the word documents, it is looking at the very first few lines of the text, as the title....

so i am going to emphasize that each page need to be modified to have a proper title, and file name that if not match, are very similar to enhance serp's.

*note... we are looking into MS Sharepoint for some of our document management... any experience using sharepoint?