Always where you need it

I made a mistake last week. I accidently left my thumb drive at my office and so couldn’t access a couple of important files while I was at the client site.

            Most of you are probably nodding right now – it happens. We’ve all left behind some important file or the like. But that’s not the point. Forgetting my thumb drive wasn’t my mistake at all. My mistake was in having important files on my thumb drive in the first place! I should have been using the online document repositories I have at my disposal.

            I have access to two different Sharepoint systems, so I’ve no excuse for keeping files elsewhere. By doing so, I’d opened myself up to a number of risks, of which being unable to use the file when I needed was among the more benign.

            Keeping files on a thumb drive, or on a laptop, or anywhere other than a server-based repository, is asking for trouble. With users making local copies, version control is a nightmare. Files may be lost – or stolen! And there are some significant but often uncounted costs to keeping local copies of documents.

            Version control is probably the most immediate value to using a file repository (or document library, as it’s called in SharePoint). Imagine, for a moment, a team of 12 people. One of them creates a document. This document is then emailed out to the other 11 members of the team. Each one looks over the document and makes changes… resulting in 12 different versions of the document. One of these gets emailed out, which sets off another string of individual changes, which yields still more changes. Before long there are dozens of versions of this document going around, each one full of redundant modifications and still missing important information which is only found on still other versions. What a mess!

            Instead, the original document should be uploaded to a document library which has versioning turned on. This way, instead of emailing the document itself out a link can be sent instead, and the other team members can make changes to that single document. SharePoint will keep track of revisions, making rollbacks and modifications easy, all while allowing the team members to collaborate.

            Of course, having so many different versions of a document wandering around all but guarantees that crucial pieces of information will be lost. An important revision will be left behind on a thumb drive, or forgotten in a folder, or any of a number of other possibilities. Without having access to it, at best redundant work will have to be performed. At worst, something truly vital will be completely lost.

            Worse yet, something important could be stolen. The more copies of a document there are, the more likely one of them will end up in the wrong hands. Most of the methods for end users to distribute and store data are notoriously insecure: portable hardware such as laptops and thumb drives are easily lost – and there’s seldom any record detailing exactly what data was stored there. And email, in spite of how much it is relied on, is really a very trusting and easily compromised system- in many cases, intercepting an emailed document is a trivial task. Look at our example with a single document and a team of merely a dozen people. That means dozens of documents being sent around, with that many more chances for interception. Instead of relying on such weak or non-existent security, important information should be kept in an online repository. With authentication protection, secure protocols, central storage, and regular backups, the risk of data loss and theft can be vastly reduced.

            Perhaps the most important value of an online repository is in costs. Remarkably, document attachments account for 60% of the space used on typical mail servers. In other words, if document libraries were used, more than half the drive space – extremely expensive drive space – would be unnecessary. That’s not counting the thumb drives and local drives, nor the nuisance of mailbox quotas and the difficulties involved in sending large files over email. And bear in mind that, no matter how many revisions, a single versioned document can never compare to the size of dozens of redundant copies found in each team members’ inbox and hard drive. And without the crippling load of huge attachments, the email system itself will run faster and more reliably!

            Leaving behind my thumb drive was a wake up call for me. Fortunately, it wasn’t a big deal. Nothing was lost, no secure information was compromised. Not everyone is so lucky. Don’t let your wakeup call be a major security breach or a lost contract.