As I mentioned earlier our developer Lars Pind has been running a quick discussion at his blog on how to address an interface problem. Here it is...
To add a document you just go to the section where you want it, click upload file (or similar) and add the document. User feedback says that this works just fine.
However at this stage it's possible to specify any additional sections you would like the document to appear in. For instance a report might be attatched to the board minutes where board members would expect to find it, and it might also reside in the pages of the campaign which produced it.
The difficulty comes with choosing these additional sections. At present a user is offered a list of all the sections (about 3000) and asked to choose. This doesn't work. the current question is how can we make it work better - and the discussion on Lar's site has produced lots of possible answers.
I thought I'd use this post to address a separate issue - why 3000 categories? The answer is that intranets I've worked on in the past have suffered from what I'll call 'gatekeeper syndrome'. Clear classifications were enforced with the result that only a few people would know where things were supposed to go. These people became responsible for 'putting things on the intranet' and as a result the site would stagnate as the gate keepers found better things to do.
The alternative was to give people the right to extend the system if they wanted it. So if a user can't find a place for a document they can just add it. The problem this brings is that the new sections are not necessarily added in a consistent way and the overall integrity of the structure suffers.
The web 2.0 solution to all this is links (which turns out to mean tags) - as suggested by Clay Shirky. The problem is that I've seen no evidence that tagging is something most web users understand, much less something that it would be easy to introduce to a global organisation (aside from a technology driven one). Our current approach is more web 1.1 (about where we were before the hype started) which was to plug in a search engine and insist on lots of meta data (which is a good thing anyway).
My current thinking is that there is no easy way out of this, beyond periodic tidyings of the hierarchy, providing guidelines about section naming / placement conventions and improvements in search technology. Those conventions are likely to be rooted in the 'worst practice' of filing things by which part of the organisation produced them. It's not what we're told is best practice, but it seems to be the instinctive user behaviour (this is our part of the intranet, on which we keep our documents).
Suggestions of other ways forward welcome...
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