My wife and I were talking the other day about document management. I’m just an end-user of such things but she deals with the admin and back-end stuff. We both concluded a lot of the problems perceived with DM systems is due to the way they’re setup.

This is usually because the people setting them up and the people using them have 2 different requirements. For example a Finance department might only want to see finance details for each project so they’d need a structure like

• Finance
  • Project A
  • Project B
• Minutes
  • Project A
  • Project B

However project managers or people working on the projects are concerned with their own projects or tasks so need a structure like

• Project A
  • Finance
  • Minutes
• Project B
  • Finance
  • Minutes

Add to this other groups or people having different needs such as document classification or retention periods and therefore needing a different structure, or the complexity of multiple sub folders and several aspects of a project or department’s functions and the problems just get worse.

A lot of the records and document people would of course argue you should just search for it based upon metadata or content; however a lot of the time I’m not looking for something specific, rather just seeing what already exists, or simply “what’s out there”. Search doesn’t really fulfill this role as you can’t know definitively if what’s returned is everything about a subject or you just searched for the wrong thing.

So I was thinking about one of the best classification systems I’ve used, namely Google’s GMail label tagging, and more recently Google’s GDrive multiple folders which operate in a similar way (Hint: when saving to a folder hold Ctrl and click on multiple folders). Then it made me think why aren’t current Document and Records Management systems using a similar approach. Sure SharePoint has Virtual Folders and Navigation Hierarchies but they’re still kind of clunky, a bit of a pain to use and you don’t seem to be able to nest folders under each other (someone please correct me if I’m wrong).

The ideal nirvana would be a system whereby when you committed a document you could save it to wherever suited you and just tag it with either a bunch of pre-defined tags or be able to create new tags on the fly. When you first setup your workspace (or even better have it plug into existing Windows Explorer) you can just drag and arrange the tags like folders in any order that suits you, even the same tag under multiple folders aka other tags. Add the ability to add tags to and arrange existing documents plus the ability to hook into cloud based storage like Dropbox, GDrive, SkyDrive or iCloud (should be easy as a lot of the time these are already integrated into Explorer) and you have a killer App.

Why is nobody building this? Or maybe my question should be anyone know some talented developers with some spare time?