Document management webclient solution

[Westy]

We have a simple multi-tenant Document management solution that reads and writes documents to the local Windows folder system. It is working very well, however, it saves the documents to folders named after the: year, company_id and contact_key.

My issue is what happens when a customer leaves and wants to take their documents with them. The folders that are named after the contact_keys are not going to mean much to them. What do others do to handle this situation? I know I can name each contact folder after the contact's name and keep a separate table that tracks name changes and then use it to rename the folders when necessary. Is that the best approach, or is it better to leave the folders the way they are and instead write a separate program that only does the folder renaming for those customers who leave?

Dean

[mboegem]

Why not just supply a dump of the contact table with the keys and contact names as well?
It's less user friendly, but you can't guarantee a unique name when converting unless you're going to build that check as we'll.

[sbutler]

I'd suggest 2 things...

1. You should allow your customer to configure how they want documents stored. Maybe some want them organized by year and month, and others prefer organizing by company. So, in your setup area, you could allow them to configure this. Then your storing them how the customer wants and don't have to worry about renaming things when they leave.

2. Instead of using the contact name for the folder, consider building a simple, but meaningful short code as the ID. So if the name is Scott Butler, the short code could be sbutler. You could come up with an algorithm to generate unique, but meaningful codes the users could identify so you don't need to rename things later. You could also make this configurable, so maybe some people would prefer sbutler. While others may want butler_scott. Then you could add a numeric suffix if it would duplicate with another.

Or, my favorite, do nothing so it makes it more difficult to leave