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WSJ interviews Chevron's CIO, who talks about the information overload his company faces:
Let's say you're looking for a document describing what a refinery looks like. There may be five versions of that document. A lot of times those go out of date and they don't show that things have been modified or remodeled. So you want to be able to find the version of the document that has the latest version of the information.
WSJ: What would make it easier to find that piece of information?
MR. MASADA: People have to do something to help themselves, which is organize their information so that it can be found. Some of it is cleanup. It's like cleaning your house. You have all sorts of stuff in your house that is irrelevant that you haven't gotten rid of. But it's a pain. And besides that, you're probably just going to make another mess the minute it's clean. It's one thing to go through your inbox and get rid of all the crap you don't need, but what I really need is a disciplined way to make sure that I don't repopulate it the very next day.Sounds like a good case for some Bit Literacy at Chevron! (Thanks, David L)
A good idea if they're running Win2k3 server is Sharepoint Portal Server. It handles documents in an easy to understand way that anyone used to websurfing can understand. It supports full versioning, reports metadata on when a file was changed and by who, and can even create a checked-out status on a file. Finally, the scalability of the access controls allow nearly anything, from everyone can read, change, and add anything, to only a specific group, or even an individual can even read certain files.
-Soldier who admin'd a 1000+ user Sharepoint server in Iraq.
Having worked on product development teams across many locations, the importance of document version tracking, storage, and dissemination is a high priority for me. You should forget Microsoft Sharepoint Server for this task--its utterly non-usable for any of the 3 document tasks. I have used other options that are even worse (you know who you are eRoom). The best I have found for this task is http://www.quickbase.com The revision tracking is second to none (you dont even have to think about it).