Document Management and Naming Conventions/Best Practices

Question

We are in the planning stages of deploying a SharePoint server that will be used for our organization's intranet. As part of the deployment, we are going to be centralizing all of the internal documents. As you can imagine, there is no standardization of the filenames for the internal documents that have already been created. What I would like to do is setup some form of standardization between the filenames now and those going forward to keep the intranet organized and uniform.

What I am looking for is any resources or wisdom on how others have organized documents for their networks and on any best practices on general naming conventions that are/have been used. I realize that every deployment will be different, but I'm just looking for a general direction to be pointed in to get started.

Answer 1

If you have a good layout for the Sharepoint site, you shouldn't have to rely on the filenames being standardized. The wisdom is to rely on metadata - add attributes to your document libraries. If something is a work instruction or an HR policy or an invoice or anything else, don't depend on the filename to tell you - specify it via carefully-planned attributes.