Identification of Document Content

Background

Like many oil companies, the client, a supermajor, is faced with losing knowledge as key experts within its organisation retire. Transferring this knowledge is important and the first identified step in this process is to capture the information gathered over many years. Whilst the data has been continuously managed and archived, the resulting knowledge from its interpretation has been captured by documents that were meant to be shared in meetings and presentations but are now stored randomly on a server.

Also the client was required to remove files from its systems as a third party content licensing agreement was coming to an end. There was concern about how to find and identify this content which was spread over 3TB on a shared network drive on the server.

Venture was asked to provide a solution to index and search this network drive both for the content of files, especially those relating to the third party as well as finding files with the third party encoded file names that may have been retained on disk.

Outcome

The Venture V-KIT tools for File Indexing were used to create a comprehensive searchable content index. The File Indexer was used to scan the entire drive; the collected file meta data and content index were stored in a SQL Server database.

Then the Venture Search application was used to run searches of the database. This included:

• Search of specific words or word combinations within the content of documents
• Identification of files with specific naming conventions, such as those starting with 3 letters then an underscore followed by 6 digits
• Hierarchical displays of the content structure or folder plan
• Creation of Excel reports to identify content and its location within the disk storage areas.

Benefits

The client is now able to search and identify and locate any content that must be removed in an easy and timely manner. In addition the content index can be used to find any other types of content, based on flexible search criteria as part of its knowledge transfer endeavours.

The search application will help newcomers and people unfamiliar with the server structure locate that knowledge and/or to define and create a more definitive structure.