Thursday, January 25, 2007

10 Requirements For A File Management System

1. Version control facility: maintains multiple versions of documents and provides an audit trail of changes. Version control is one of the essential requirements of an Intranet file management system. A version control system can save organizations hundreds of man-hours typically spent trying to collate and organize different versions of documents and files. Have you ever tried to compare printed copies of documents trying to figure out what changes were made when and by whom? With a good version control system, your intranet should be able to store different versions of files with information about changes made, users who accessed the file, dates and times of access.

2. Ability to store Meta data: A file management system will allow user to create and store Meta data. Meta data is data about the files. Some examples of Meta data are file type, data created, date modified, keywords, description, owner, creator, last modified by etc.

3. Security: Ability to setup security by users/groups and folder/files. The system should allow an administrator to set read, write, delete and update security permissions.

4. Check In-Check out capability: Users should be able to checkout documents if they have permission to do so. The same user should have the permission to check-in the document after it has been updated. While the document has been checked out the system should flag the document as being out and only allow other users to have read access to the file. This will prevent multiple users from the updating the same file at the same time.

5. Search and indexing capability: File management systems tend to grow in size over time. As the number of files managed increases, it becomes harder to find documents. A file management system should support indexing and search capabilities. This allows all new files/documents added to the system to be indexed for faster and easier retrieval. A good indexing engine will scan the files and extract keywords and Meta information from the files and create a search index. This index is then used by the Intranet search engine to respond to user queries and return files that are the relevant to the search request.

6. Maintain file interdependencies and groupings: A typical file management system will have to deal with groups of files that are related to one another or to a collection. For example: A Sales Presentation collection of documents might contain a set of PowerPoint slides, a Word document, a set of Excel sheets and charts, graphics etc.

7. Interface: a web based user interface that can be accessed from a standard web browser (i.e., Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer). The interface should be intuitive and provide an efficient user experience.

8. Structure and organizational capabilities: The system should allow users to create file structures similar to operating system file storage structures. The file system should have the ability to create folders and subfolders for storage of files. The users should also be able to move one or more files between folders.

9. Supports multiple file types: The system allows users to upload and download most standard file types like Word, Access, Excel, Text, JPEG and Html.

10. Maintain file expiration dates: This feature will make the file system more manageable. Once an expiration date is set for a file or set of files, the system will track this date and delete the file/s on the specified day. This will keep the system clean and automatically purge old files and unwanted documents.


http://www.intrack.com/intranet/10_requirements.cfm