Wednesday 11 June 2008

Document storage

Our Electronic Document Management project has been very slow to take off. We bought the software at least a couple of years ago and encountered all sorts of problems, including technical and support issues, as well as internal resource allocation. However, I'm pleased to say that it now seems to be taking off - we've restructured the project team with more resource allocated to it, and we've got three pilots about to start. A student eFile, web-based computer registration for staff, and programme specification approval and storage. These should test both the workflow and the document management parts of the system, and hopefully they will be up and running by September. Assuming the pilots are successful, we'll be looking to roll it out in targeted areas across the University - I say targeted as it has enormous potential, and we will have to be careful how we resource it. I'm keen to see all of our committee papers moved into it as soon as possible for example.

We will have to be very careful about guidelines and policies for storing documents - we already have a number of places staff and students can put stuff. We have personal filestore, shared filestore, the portal (MUSE), central filestore (the SAN), our own hard discs, and now a document management system. Even more places to lose stuff....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are there any thoughts to investigate a global search function for documents? We have about 6 locations for files and no easy way of finding out which place is definitive. The Document Management System will not solve all these problems overnight, it will take a long time to fully 'realise the benefits'.

I am sure that Google has an answer though :)

Unknown said...

hmm, think we'll have to leave that to google