The end of folder hierarchies

In the digital workplace, the key to productivity is good findability of information. To collaborate effectively, team members must be able to effortlessly access accurate and current information. Therefore, a logical organization system of documents is crucial in every shared workspace. Marcus Roberts, Director of Atvero, shares his perspectives on why it is beneficial for AEC practices to replace folders with metadata for intuitive organization of documents.

Folder structures and the barriers in collaboration

Using files and folders to organize computer documents was first seen on a commercial computer system in 1981. Forty years later, it’s still the dominant way to organize files.

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The metaphor of folders and files reflected how paper files were stored in filing cabinets. A key difference though was computer folders could themselves contain folders, creating a hierarchical structure.

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In the early PC era this worked well as each person’s folders lived only on their own computer and the folder hierarchy reflected their own mental model of how to organize their files. As soon as computer networks and files servers provided us a place to collaborate and share files, organising those shared places stared to become a problem. Each person had a different idea on how to set up the folders, making it difficult for others to find the right folder to put or find a file in.

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To bring order, most practices have defined “folder structures” – logical folder hierarchies that define where to store files of a particular type. Those who have worked in architectural or engineering firms over the last 15 years must have become all too familiar with lengthy meetings across many months to agree on a folder structure that works for everyone in the practice.

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Nevertheless, another challenge was created. Even with defined folder structures, there always seems to be more than one place to store a file! In AEC projects, keeping duplicated copies of a file in multiple locations can easily create out-of-sync collaboration as it’s hard to know which is the correct latest version of the file.

How metadata provides simple navigation of information

In a digitalized AEC industry, professionals need know the location of up-to-date project documents for successful collaboration. Atvero has taken what some people consider a bold decision – to do away with folder structures altogether. Instead, we have a single flat location where all files related to a project are stored at one level.

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How does this work when you have more than a handful of files? We use the metadata associated files to allow people to group and filter files in a way that makes sense to them. With an easy-to-use filtering system, people can ask Atvero to show, for example, all the drawing files in a project, but only the ones in a specific set of categories and grouped by site level.

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As useful collections of groups and filters are built, they can be saved as views that are shareable across the project team. Now a document can appear in multiple "places" based on the logic of the person viewing the document set.

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Metadata-driven searching and filtering works particularly well for documents named using an ISO 19650 naming scheme. Such files are named particularly well with metadata that is useful for filtering but isn't particularly suited to ordering in a folder-based file explorer. By allowing any ordering and filtering based on metadata, it's much easier to group documents by package type, for example.

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The most significant advantage is there's no cognitive load in choosing where to store a file, nor the opportunity to accidentally keep a file in a folder no one will ever find it. Instead, there's just one place for every file.

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At Atvero, we truly believe we've seen the future, and that's a place without folders!

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