Please help! What have you found to be the best way to organize all company files and folders?

Question

I'd love some guidance on what others have found to be the best way to organize all of our company files and folders. (Project files, department related files such as hr documents, training material, product documentation, ebooks/whitepapers for learning, ideas & inspiration photo/video collections, brand assets, companywide business templates, etc... you get the point LOL…)

We use a ton of cloud tools and have files and duplicates scattered everywhere... And even worse no one knows where to save anything or where to find it. So they usually end up remaking something that was already done!!

Please share some advice, examples, anything - so frustrated and willing to pay for help :)  Cheers ~ Rochelle R.

Milo Test · Answer

No policies, really. The last thing I want to do is discourage anyone from using Confluence.
I haven't needed to up the attachment size max. higher than 60 MB, as it is mostly PowerPoint and Excel docs. Part of my job is to tweak user-generated pages and to convert docs to pages so I actively reduce the number of attachments and most of our PDFs don't need to be pretty as they are internal, so the PDF export is fine. Creating marketing-quality PDFs is very time consuming and so far, not quite up to snuff, but most of the marketing docs are housed in our intranet and we can just link to them.
The real challenge was getting people to think Confluence first before dumping files in Dropbox or a server share. Thankfully more and more engineers are getting on-board with the whole collaboration scheme and when someone asks, "Where can I find X?" they chime in, "It's in Confluence."

Paul Stallworth · Answer

@Milo can you expand a little on what, if any, policies you have about file attachments?  For example, one of the first things I had to do was up the attachment size to 100MB to accept some PDFs from our web team.  I also restrict the attachment indexing size to 1MB for performance reasons.

Currently I'm advising folks to turn things into pages as well and also try to follow a "if it has value to other users, attach it" method for deciding to put large attachments in Confluence or not.  I don't know how well Confluence scales as a document repository (when compared with something liked Sharepoint or other products).

Milo Test · Answer

We convert as much as possible to Confluence pages. What few items remain, PowerPoints, etc. are attached to the appropriate space and listed with the Attachments macro.

The file-repository features of Confluence have eliminated the need for all the other "dropboxes" that had been used.