In the past, we have talked about why Box will never be a serious ECM – but when we talk to our clients, almost all of them have one or more “shared” drives that are used to store documents. For this post, let’s explore exactly what we mean by a “shared” drive and why your company should look to move away from shared drives and towards a full Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite to manage documents.
What do we mean by a shared drive?
First – what exactly is a shared drive? For most companies, this is simply a hard drive of some sort attached to users machine as a network drive. People within the organization know that their files are on C:\, the corporate policies are on P:\, Human Resources documents are on H:\, IT documents are on I:\, etc.
So you may be thinking – “we moved away from shared drives a long time ago! We use {insert-cloud-service-here} now.” While we’d agree with cloud services being better than the P:\ drive, companies can still fall into the same “share drive” pitfalls with the cloud as a simple mapped network drive.
Why should my company move away from share drives?
Most companies start out with some sort of shared drives to organize documents. Let’s explore why you may want to ditch your shared drive(s) and move to an ECM.
Your shared drives are a mess
[pullquote]Without governance and control around how people utilize the shared drive, it can become a mess relatively quickly…[/pullquote]Shared drives start out clean when IT releases them to the wild. Then, entropy takes over and the shared drive becomes more and more messy over time. Different users may want to name documents with a different pattern, or store documents in a completely different folder hierarchy. Typically, these users are not being malicious – the naming scheme or directory structure may make sense to their particular use case, but may be very confusing to other users within the organization. Without governance and control around how people utilize the shared drive, it can become a mess relatively quickly – whether or not the drive is a mapped NAS/SAN or in the cloud. When properly implemented, an ECM tool gives users the ability to store documents in the repository in a consistent manner with governance controls to limit messiness over time.
You need more robust searching
With a shared drive, you have very limited ability to search the documents. You can search on the file name and some limited document properties (created, modified, etc). Other properties are available such as title, subject, authors, etc. But what good are those properties if they are not enforced? Maintaining custom properties is possible, but the lack of governance again makes this not sustainable over time. Searching on file properties can be unintuitive for non-techy users, so most of the time, the majority of user’s searching is based on the file location within the folder structure or the file name itself. Given that shared drives tend to get more messy over time, this is not a sustainable approach. An ECM tool provides the ability to attach robust metadata to documents. Additionally, custom metadata is often attached and enforced on documents to make searching much easier. While it is possible to search within document contents with Windows, typically users don’t have this turned on since it can slow down the machine considerably as it maintains the index (especially for a networked location with many GB of files). An ECM tool typically provides a robust “full text” indexing component that allows users to quickly search within file contents.
You need additional document security or workflow
When setting up a shared drive, an IT administrator can set up basic security. Things like “the IT group only has access to I:\” or “HR users can see the H:\ drive and have full control, but each employee can only see their particular HR folder on the drive”. But what if you need more advanced security? Typically, this comes with workflow processes, especially when dealing with document approval. For example, during an approval process, certain users should be able to see and modify the “Draft” version. Other users should only know that the latest Approved version exsits. Even if these users search for the document, the Draft version should be invisible. On a shared drive, typically your only recourse is to copy documents and move them around the folder structure to ensure the proper security. But if your shared drive is a mess, this can be extremely difficult in practice.[pullquote]On a shared drive, typically your only recourse is to copy documents and move them around the folder structure to ensure the proper security.[/pullquote]
Apart from security, Workflow opens up a lot of automation possibilities centered around documents. If your users are tired of emailing documents around, an ECM-based workflow process system may be a welcome change.
Users are already ditching the shared drives
Some users, frustrated with the issues above, take matters into their own hands. It’s easy to create a personal Google drive, OneDrive or Dropbox account. Most companies have policies and IT security that attempts to curtail the placement of corporate documents on a public cloud drive. But are you absolutely sure users aren’t putting documents out there? Even if you block access on your local network, what about users on their home networks? With the rise of BYOD within the worplace, placing corporate documents where they shouldn’t be is easier than ever. An ECM can curtail this behavior by giving users the appropriate level of security, collaboration tools, and document governance.
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