Managing Information in a Team
When working on a project or in a team generally you may find the following suggestions useful:
- Create a shared file space on your server so everyone in your team has access to all files.
- Different access rights can be assigned to individual project team members.
- Some documents can be made available as 'read only' if appropriate.
- Confidential files that are not for wider circulation can be saved in a sub directory that has restricted access.
- It is important that everyone knows where to save documents and in turn where to look for them.
- When all documents are saved in the same directory it is helpful to put a footer on each document with the filename and path on so that when a hardcopy is printed colleagues will know where to look for it on the shared drive.
- It is worth giving some thought to filenames, they should be sensible and reasonably straightforward for colleagues to locate. For minutes of meetings you could start with the meeting date and then the name of the meeting such as '2005 12 19 Weekly Staff Meeting.doc' - saving the document in this way with the year and month at the front of the name ensures that they appear together in the directory in date order.
- Giving people as much information as possible without making file names too long will save time in searching for documents. It is also an important housekeeping issue not to keep duplicated files either on the shared file space or as a hardcopy.
Use the following link to see an example of a policy for saving, versioning, etc of documents and files.
