Chapter 10: File and Document Management | Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics

Every computer user manages files and documents every day. It is an important and often frustrating task to find the needed file quickly and to be sure that it is the correct version. Every step you can take to make this task easier will be received with applause from your users. If you also can make it just a bit more fun, they will cheer. File and document management is this important! SharePoint can help you make this happen. And this chapter is all about how to help users find their files more quickly and easily.

Traditional File Chaos

To understand what SharePoint can do requires that you analyze how things work traditionally. The following table shows the typical tasks a user performs with files and documents every day:

Table 10.1: Typical Tasks
Open table as spreadsheet
Common File Tasks	Challenges/Problems
Create a file	Where will this file be stored so it can be found later by me and my colleagues? What name should I give this file so it is clear what it contains?
Update a file	How do I find the file to be updated? How can I save the new version without overwriting the old file? How can I update a public file over a period of days and avoid having someone see the document before it is fully updated? How can several people cooperate when updating a file?
Open a file	How do I find the file? How can I be sure it is the latest version? How can I contact the most recent author if necessary?
Delete a file	How can I be sure that there is no other copy of this file still in existence?

These are the challenges that your users deal with every time they work with a file or document. Face the reality: Users solve these challenges in several ways, and the consequence is that you soon have file chaos. No one is sure where all the files are stored, no one is sure that the file they found is the latest version, and all these files make the backup and restore procedures unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming.

Document Management Systems

There are some great tools for creating documents and files, with MS Office being the premium example. Some of these tools have built-in features for organizing and locating files. This is good, but the problem is that this solution only works within each tool; there is no global solution for managing all types of documents and files. So, the traditional document management solutions may be good to some extent, but they are not enough. That is why all, not some, but all organizations have a more or less chaotic system for managing their files. Even so, users have learned to live with this situation. Can you imagine how much time you would save yourself and your company if you could reduce this file chaos, or even eliminate it altogether?

One partial solution for this file chaos is a document management system, or DMS. These types of products have existed for many years, and people love the idea of them when they read about what they can do. A DMS costs a lot of money, but if all these promises are fulfilled, the improved efficiency and productivity of your users can quickly result in a good ROI (return on investment). While this is a pleasant idea, the reality is not always that positive. What most often happens is that some users love the new DMS and start working with it to its full extent. Others start to use it grudgingly, but after some time they go back to the old routine, which they are more familiar and comfortable with, despite the problems it causes them. And some simply never even start using the new DMS. Period. The result is even worse than before. Now you have some files stored in the old way (usually in a mix of file shares, local disks, and mailbox attachments), while other files are stored in the fancy DMS. And the organization is paying an expensive license every year to keep the DMS working.

What does the manager or other person who is responsible for the DMS purchase do now? That is right, they continue to work with the DMS, to pay its annual fees, and maybe even invest some more in it, trying to make it easier to use. Isn't this strange? At first glance, it might even seem foolish, but that depends on who you are. If you were the person who convinced the CEO that you needed this DMS and that the ROI for this $50,000 per year was no problem, you are now faced with the prospect of either telling the CEO you have problems and most likely get sacked or trying to fix it somehow, while praying to whichever God pleases you that the users will somehow get the idea and start using the system.

How can something like this happen? The basic idea is excellent: Get a system that will help users to manage their documents in a more sophisticated way. So why does it go wrong? The usual reasons are one or more of these:

q The system is too complex to use: Having too many features makes it hard for the average user to understand how to use it.
q The system is not integrated into MS Office: If users must produce the document in MS Word and then move to another application for entering document properties and so on, it is easier for users to store the file in the same file system that they have always used.
q The system slows down the users: If the DMS is slow or requires several extra steps that users must complete, users will see this as an obstacle that has a negative affect on their performance.
q Users are expected to learn the system without training: This may not be a problem if there are just a few new features to learn that are intuitive and well integrated into MS Office. If not, this is definitely a show-stopper.
q The user refuses to learn anything new, ever!: This is more common than one first may expect. And the reason for this strange opinion is often fear: fear that he or she will not understand the new system, fear that it will be a more complicated process and take more time than before, and general fear of any type of change, regardless of what it is.

That last bullet is not something to ignore. If you can make such a user to accept the new solution, you can get the results you hope for when investing in this DMS solution. So, try to find these users and use them as indicators of how successful your new DMS solution is.

Traditional File Management Systems

Without a DMS solution, the need to organize files and documents must be solved another way. This organizational need is most often addressed this way:

Create a hierarchical folder tree in a file server. The user has a mapped disk drive to that file share.
Name each file so it is easy to understand what it contains (for example, "Budget_Q3_2006_V1.XLS").

These two methods have been with us since MS DOS 2.0 was released in 1983, when users for the first time could create hierarchical file structures. It was a great feature at that time, taken from the UNIX operating system, of course. A typical traditional file system looks something like this:

     C:\Public            \Projects                  \IT                       \AD-migration                       \Exchange                       \DMS                  \Sales                       \Marketing                       \Customers                             \HM                             \Ericson                             \Ford                        \Products            \Customers                  \HM                       \Contracts                       \Quotes                       \Products                  \Ericson                       \Contracts                       \Quotes                       \Products                  \Ford                       \Contracts                       \Quotes                       \Products

With this hierarchical folder tree, it is very easy to find all project documents for AD migration done by IT and all quotes for Ford. But what if a user wants to see all quotes, regardless of the customer? Then this user must look into three different folders, and if there are 300 customers, the user must look in all 300 Quote folders. In this situation, it is very common for the user to copy these quotes to his local client, just to get them listed together and easier to work with. Now you have the same files in two places. This happens all the time and is one of the major reasons you end up with file chaos.

Why is the folder's structure arranged by customers and then document types? The answer is probably that someone thought that was a great idea when it was created, based on whatever limited criteria he or she was using at the time. If this is not true anymore, you can of course rearrange this structure; it will take some time, but it certainly can be done. But your users must be informed about this change, or they will become very confused when the folder structure has changed. The point here is that a file system is almost static of necessity. The folder structure will stay like this for a long time, even if some people want to change it. This is something you have to accept when using a file system.

What about the filenames, such as "Budget_Q3_2007_V1.XLS"? Is this really a good name? Well, sort of. It is easy to see what type of content it has (Budget), what period it is from (Q3 2007), and what version it is (V1). The problem here is that there is nothing that will force another user to use the same filename format. The next user may call an updated version of that file "2007-Q3_Budget-2.xls". It is still rather easy to guess that this is the second version of the previous file. But the third update gets this name: "Q3-7-3-BG.xls". If these three files are stored in different places, it really starts to get messy. The problem is that you cannot describe the file using anything other than its name. You can of course create a new folder named Budget and then store files with names like "Q3-2007-v1.xls" in it. Imagine that you copy that file to another place now. How will you know it's a budget file in its new location?

Another common problem is keeping track of updates: For example, when a specific file you depend on gets updated by another user, how do you get this information? Or, if there is a new quote sent out to the customer H&M, how will you know this?

As you can see, there are lots of problems and limitations with the traditional file structure as we know it. Fortunately, there are solutions available to address all of this, as you will see in the following sections.

What You Really Need

You need a new method to organize and group files without using folders, something that will be easy to change, or will even change automatically for each user looking at these files. For example, a project manager might want to see project documents presented in one way, but each project member may need to organize this information in another way, maybe even hiding everything but the files the project member works with.

All these problems with filenames could be solved if you were allowed to create your own properties for a file or document, such as Document Type, Year, and Period. Then you could store this information in the properties instead of building it into the actual filename. If the system also could keep track of versions automatically, you would not have this mess anymore either, right?

You also need a mechanism that will tell you when something gets changed. Since each user knows best what files they are interested in, they must be able to define for themselves which files to monitor and how to monitor them. Besides files, users may need to monitor folders as well.

Another common need is to have a feature that will enable a user to update an existing document stored in a shared file resource without any risk that other users may see what they are doing until the work is complete. This method must be able to lock the file for editing by a specific user regardless of whether that person is actively editing the file. If there is more than one user who will update this document during this editorial period, there must be a way that allows several users to collaborate without somebody else seeing what is happening until the work is completed and published.

To summarize the entire situation, what you need are features like these:

q A way to organize, sort, and group files, based on file properties.
q A file structure that is easy for the user to directly modify at any time.
q A way to describe the files other than using the filename.
q A way to force all users to follow this new naming standard.
q An automatic version history that keeps track of every modification made to the file.
q A way to monitor individual files and folders that notifies you when something happens.
q A way to lock the editing of a shared file to a specific user, regardless of whether that user is working with the file.
q A way to handle the situation where more than one user will edit a shared document during a period. When all of these editorial users are done, this file should be published so that everyone can see it in this shared location.

And all of this must be easy to use and integrate into the MS Office products as much as possible. It must also be fast and reliable. Can it be done, you ask? You bet!