Office Wide Directory Structure

Hello! I've recently been tasked with organizing all of our companies digital files into some sort of a standard structure. Fun. I had done this already for all the CAD files - but now I'm being asked to do the same for the rest of the company. I could wing it, and probably pull it off just fine, but I'd like to do this right the first time. Are there any published standards or recommendations for how to organize an office's file structure? Any help would be great!

What kind of company is this and what types of office files are we talking about?

I guess you would call us a construction contractor. Besides drafting (which I've already got pretty organized), we'd be looking at Company Policies, Position Roles, Employee Evaluations, Contracts, Change Orders, Invoices, Purchase Orders... the list goes on...

I'm sure I could come up with a decent way of organizing it, but I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

On my day job on a engineering company I basically work with a tiny application called Folder Scout. It saves a lot of time and gives instant access on any folder organization scheme, no matter how deep or complex the folder structure is. Very useful to jump from project to project just based on project number or name.

You can also find some Tips & Tricks about folder organization strategies at Folderscout web site.

I guess you would call us a construction contractor. Besides drafting (which I've already got pretty organized), we'd be looking at Company Policies, Position Roles, Employee Evaluations, Contracts, Change Orders, Invoices, Purchase Orders... the list goes on...

 

I'm sure I could come up with a decent way of organizing it, but I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

assigning structures to folders can be easy but searching for a specific item or document is another task. a better way maybe is to have a document management software where you can search by keyword, filename, etc.. an example of this is archetype software, but i guess there are other similar products.