Network files run amuk...

[lorenzo -dot- gonzalez -at- ints -dot- com]

So, we have a sloppy network that?s overrun with files (many going back
several years that we no longer use). This has become  a problem, mainly
because no one has done housekeeping on these files. Frequently, we have
requests from people at our company for files that we in the tech comm.
team have never heard existed. To find these files, we usually run a
windows search by filename or worse, by keyword (which can take an hour to
complete). The manager of our team has requested we create a file in Excel
that lists paths of all the files we work with (or no longer do), along
with descriptions. The ultimate desire is, at best, to import this
information into a database, at worst, to be able to find files more
quickly than an hour. This approach seems counter-intuitive to me, since
we would still need to search files by keyword using the slow Windows
system, regardless of whether we had an excel file or not. Unless, of
course, there was a program that could go through each file and create a
list of keywords based on the contents of each file. Yes, I know that's
farfetched and, ultimately, too large of a scale to get into just to save
us an hour of searching here and there.

My question: is there a way to automate a list of files on a network
drive? I am searching for a program that will analyze the names of all
files on our network drive and output those filenames as a spreadsheet or
text delimited file. If possible, it would be great to be able to somehow
import this information into a database automatically, but I know that's a
far reach.

Does anyone out here have any experience with this? Or am I barking up the
wrong tree?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-Lorenzo

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