Document Management

My reply on the forum around how to manage documents you add into TheBrain:

I'm a novice user... and I guess I'm not "getting it"

I want to create links to documents, but then also relate useful metadata to the document.

Things like:-

Who sent it to me or where I found it (could be a url)

when

Why I was sent it / found it / kept it

What I should be doing it it

..By when

Key facts within it

and be able to track versions and updates (relating the document versions to changing metadata)

I appreciate I could probably do this by creating custom thoughts to each document. But I don't trust myself to do this consistently. Or to use the exactly the same name of the person I send it to etc. - Which is not going to help when I try to search for it.

Design advice gratefully received!

Steve

Interesting question, and I'm sure there are many answers depending on what you need and your workflow.

I try and do the absolute minimal I can to capture information, but keep the context so it's useful to me.

Some things I keep in mind.

If I think I'll need to find the document based on a person, I'll add them as a parent/jump. I'll also do that with a website. This means that I can find the document either by going to the project/area or the person who is the primary resource/contact/requestor for that document. Not very important when you are working on it regularly, but very useful in about a year when you are trying to find it.

If it won't aid a search I'll add the information as another attachment. For example, if I get the document from a website I'll attach the document and the page to the thought. Same thing with an e-mail, I'll attach it as an attachment.

For some items that I need to keep structured information on, I'll create a template thought. <a widows="2" text-indent="0px" letter-spacing="normal" font-variant="normal" text-align="left" font- background-color="rgb(247, 247, 247)" font-weight="normal" line-height="normal" orphans="2" color="rgb(59, 89, 152)" text-transform="none" font-size="13px" white-space="normal" target="_blank" text-decoration="underline" font-family="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" href="brain://E2546655-7E9D-171A-AFE7-0E691AC56AA7/0863B639-30E7-5AFD-5FEB-74B22AF3113C/2011-02-22+%7C+The+Power+of+Duplication" word-spacing="0px">See here</a> for a bit more information on that. This allows me to create a duplicate of a thought with some fields already added in the notes, prompting me to add in creation date, requested by, modifications, modification dates etc.

An alternate method is to create a text file with the layout of the information you want to capture and save it as a file template. To create a file template, first create the file with the layout you want. Then in the thought tab, click the Add Attachment button and click Templates. Add the file template to the template folder, then every time you want to add a text/word file to a thought with the information, just click the Add Attachment button and choose the file from the list.

When <a target="_blank" href="http://thebrain.uservoice.com/forums/4597-thebrain-feature-suggestions/suggestions/70182-node-types-with-structured-meta-data-" >this request</a> is implemented it'll probably change my workflow considerably, but this works for me right now.

Finally, for versions I usually create a child thought using the contextual naming track so it's called [File], Versions. Then I'll add my versions and note the version reasons in the uhh, notes. <img src="/54b974fa-5c26-5024-9383-f4a370328504.gif"/>

Just my ideas. They recently did <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thebrain.com/community/recorded-events/basics/filemanagement/" >a recorded event</a> for using TheBrain for file management. I haven't watched it yet, but you may want to take a look to see if it gives you some other ideas.

who I sent it to...

etc

Document Management

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