What’s In & What’s Out: What Should Stay On Your Shared Drives

It’s time. You’re finally migrating your files, maybe to a new SharePoint site or some other improved file repository.

But it seems like you’re faced with an insurmountable task. Which files should you take with you to this new destination? Just how many files are you staring in the face? 10,000? 100,000? Maybe more?

Let’s take a look at what’s in, and what’s out, when you’re organizing a new information management system.

What’s a retention schedule?

Simply put, you need some rules.

A retention schedule defines which records you need, not only for business purposes, but for regulatory reasons too. Your policy should govern how long you need files, compliance and business continuity being the cornerstones of information management.

Every record is different, which is why businesses find themselves in an organizational pickle in the first place. So a retention schedule also needs to have rules for specific files such as emails, invoices, financial reports, notifications and more.

Without an alignment between your shared drive content and a retention schedule, you simply have no place to start when determining what needs to stay, and what can go.

Even large organizations struggle to develop retention schedules so it comes as no surprise this is often a lower priority for small and medium-sized businesses.

How FileFacets Helps: Define Your Buckets

With FileFacets, you get a framework for designing your retention schedule. With our 20 years of experience in the content management arena, we have default rules for different types of information that you can choose to accept or modify.

Then the Content Design platform documents the details. With an intuitive graphical interface, you can design your own outline for organizing the types of content you are sharing and then associate those elements with retention schedules.

One benefit of this approach is that each file is tagged with meta data that associates it with different data groups and retention schedules, so you are more easily able to find and manage your files.

A sound information structure, test-driven in FileFacets before you implement it, helps you make sure you will be able to successfully retrieve the files you need in your new shared drive.