

Document control - how hard can it be? - ajkirwin
http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0007-document-control.html

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gibsonf1
Being an architect, I'm used to dealing with thousands of documents on a
project. The only meaningful way I've discovered to organize those documents
is by the flow of work they are being used on, which is what we do. It is
especially important when dealing with multiple companies on a single project.
Folders and nested folders are a paradigm of the low-productivity windows way
- we tried this, it never works well. But document management is really only a
small feature of a larger integrated application that guides users through the
larger workflow of getting projects done.

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thaumaturgy
Oh, hmm. It would be kinda cool to separate the document management from the
workflow ... like, build a document management system with an API, and then
create various user interfaces that could interact with it according to
different applications.

~~~
gibsonf1
I think that is the future - many smaller apps integrated together as features
within a larger comprehensive application. Integration is the key to really
getting productive as opposed to having multiple disconnected apps.

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thaumaturgy
So, I posted my comment on the site, since I happened across this from "that
other" forum.

But I've been playing around with this idea for a while, and I'd love to get
some HN feedback on it.

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swombat
Hey, Daniel Tenner here (author of the article), and one of the technology
guys behind Woobius.

We hit the same problem with folders-within-folders getting too complicated,
but we tried a subtly different solution. All of us use tags in things like
GMail, but the funny thing is, we end up using them like folders (in fact, I
have my tags in gmail mapped as folders in Mail.app).

So what we did on Woobius is we implemented folders, but we restricted them to
one level. So far, a handful of people have requested folders-within-folders,
but the majority seem happy with the system as it is, and the big advantage of
getting rid of that messy folder hierarchy is that it's made the system look a
lot simpler and quicker to use.

Would love to know your thoughts on whether that works for you.

I'll add this reply onto disqus as well.

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thaumaturgy
Eh, not really.

Treating tags like folders isn't really bad; you might not be using them quite
to their fullest extent, but you're also not really limiting yourself when it
comes to categorizing data.

...which is where the single-hierarchy folder system wouldn't work, because it
does create a limit.

I like to think of it this way: currently, the paradigm (I hate that word) is
that you have a folder -- a category -- which owns lots of files. What I want
instead is to have a file which owns lots of folders -- or categories.

The one client I mentioned in my Disqus response is doing some energy
research, government contract and all that. They really need to keep things
well-organized, and they need to be able to organize drawings, specs, notes,
graphs, test data, etc. etc. by project, by contributor, by date, by revision,
by ... etc. etc.

Another client is a doctor's office, and that's probably all I need to say
about that. :-)

So, no. While a one-deep hierarchy solves some problems, it's still clutching
on to a silly way of organizing things, without actually providing the
flexibility of a really intelligent tagging system.

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joshwa
Ultimately a folder (or a tag) is just another piece of metadata, like the
ones you listed-- project, contributor, date, revision, etc.

The core issues are input (how do I get this metadata attached to the content?
dragging to a folder, document analysis, filesystem metadata, tag
autocomplete) and retrieval (how can I quickly sort and filter to find the
document(s) I need, based on some set of metadata criteria?)

Whether or not that metadata has a hierarchical structure (a
taxonomy/vocabulary), and whether that structure is controlled (e.g. only
privileged users can create new terms) is secondary to the question of speedy,
usable input and retrieval.

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wallflower
I worked with Documentum document management systems. Tags are critical to
being able to retrieve a document once it's scanned in. The problem, of
course, is mis-tagged documents.

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joshwa
mis-tagged is the same as mis-filed. This is where having a controlled
vocabulary makes sense, or at least a periodic orphan cleanup process.

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thaumaturgy
Right, mis-tagging is a _process_ problem, not a software one. At least, I
can't think of a software way right now to solve that.

...Although, like you mention above, being able to find documents quickly can
make it much easier to handle. For example, the UI should give you the ability
to show all documents modified in the last N days, by user X, etc.

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destinarch
Having to work with and ditribute hundereds of documents to dozends of people
every day - woobius is the best!

~~~
zacharypinter
Care to mention why?

