23 February

Welcome to the Trovo Organisation Blog

 

Trovo is Latin for "I find". We chose the name partly because we help people search for things, but we wanted to focus on the word "find" as there is a lot more to finding something than just searching for it.

 

Perhaps the most important aspect of finding, more important even than searching, is being organised with your work; essentially putting things where it's easy to find them again. You might think that this is a lot easier than it used to be now most of us use computers all the time... But in some respects it has got a lot harder. Where at one time we had to set up filing systems that structured how documentation was stored in some detail, these days we can be a lot more "free and easy", which isn't always a good thing.

 

Take the classic shared folder for instance. Most companies have a folder that everyone can add their files to somewhere on the network, which means all the company's files ought to be in "one place". And so people put them in the shared folder – and they mostly know where they are. This is fine while the person in question still works at the company... but often once they've gone their files can become very hard to find.

 

How is your shared folder organised? Does each employee have a folder with their name on it? So there's a Smith_John1 and Smith_John2 maybe? Which John Smith is which? Does the IT department make them wear a badge with their number on?

 

Doing things "in the folder with your name on" (which is kind of a Microsoft default) means that, as long as you know who created a document you'll have a decent chance of finding it, though quite often everyone is left to organise the contents of their folder in their own unique way – which means the ability to think like the owner helps. If the owner is still around, of course, it's easy enough to find the file they created: you just ask them for a copy and, if they're not too busy, they email it to you... (So that's not the actual file then – just a copy of it).

 

In the light of this, perhaps your company organises everything on a project-by-project basis instead? So what about the document that relates to Project Alpha and Project Theta? Where does that go again? OK – make a copy and put it in both... Hang on – it's got a typo in it, so do remember to change it in both locations.

 

In other words, shared folders have their issues...

 

The big boys in IT have known this for a while and have taken steps to sort the problem out. One of the most successful steps has been SharePoint, which if you believe the press (and we have no reason not to) is the fastest-growing Microsoft server product ever – though there's a difference between something being "fast-growing" and "successful" of course. Trovo loves SharePoint, but one thing that bugs us (and a lot of other people so we're told) is the fact that despite lots of care and attention being put into making it better for organising work than a shared folder on a network, it's still too easy to use it just like a shared folder on a network.

 

Because it's so easy to use SharePoint in the 'old' way, a lot of people do. So you find Document Libraries with folders in them named after projects, or even people... Most beginners don't realise that, out of the box, SharePoint knows who made a document, and who last touched it. And if you want to set each document to relate to a project, you can do that, too – without the need for a new folder. And then you can filter a list to show "all of Dave's documents" or "the spreadsheets from Project Gamma" and so on...

 

But it's the new way of thinking that people aren't used to. People understand saving files into folders; that's what they've always done. Plus they've never been able to attach extra information to files to help them find them before. (Incidentally – you can do something similar to files in Vista as well as the Mac OS too – though has anyone ever done that?) So is it so surprising that the first thing anyone does when they've never faced a SharePoint Document Library is select New > Folder and create "Dave's Documents"?

 

The Trovo Organisation Blog, along with its sisters the Trovo Search Blog and the Trovo Collaboration Blog, is all about new ways of thinking and doing. But we don't want to evangelise technology too much. Yes SharePoint (note: other online collaboration products for business are available) is a much more effective way of organising work than a simple shared folder on a network, but only if it's used properly. And it's a common failing of the IT trade to blithely assume people will want to work in new "better" ways – particularly if the old ways of doing something still work (after a fashion) and people therefore don't have an incentive to change.

 

So we aim to use this blog to try and provide a gentle, realistic incentive to work smarter, to explore the possibilities and clamber out of our ruts. We hope you'll help us do so with your own comments and suggestions, too. Enjoy!

 

David Gerrard – Trovo Technical Director

08:58 GMT  |  Read comments(0)