Almost every business arrives at the same solution to this basic problem – a folder structure that makes some level of sense to their people. And then the trouble starts, when people don’t follow the rules, when new hires come on-stream, when the “folder standard” needs to evolve, when data needs to be archived, but not lost, and when the data begins to overwhelm.

Hence we wrote Valet about five years ago to address this very issue. Valet is a folder management tool. Valet is used to generate or update folder structures when core business operations that affect the corporate network are performed, for example, setting up new customers, adding or removing employees, and moving a “prospect” to “client” status, to name just a few. Valet is used to execute these business processes in a standardized fashion to eliminate the clutter, confusion and fragmented shared network drive arrangements that most businesses live with each day.

• Valet organizes file/folder creation and maintenance into “object centers”, such as Clients, Employees, Projects, Marketing and so on.

• Objects have Activity Centers, where logical Action Items for the Objects exist.

• Action Items can be either creation of standardized folder structures, or population of folders with files copied from any source, or maintenance of the Object’s Life Cycle.

• Life Cycle processing is managed by Valet, in order to move, rename, archive, and offline folders as maintenance of the storage structure is done, and to enforce the behavior for Object during its lifetime.

• As part of Valet’s behavior, automatic checking for historical, legacy, or archived data when creating “new” Objects is done, to provide a choice to the operator for reactivation of the Object or to create a new one.

• Valet Reports include an Activity Log by Object or Category, Statistics, and Summary Reports. A Table of Contents can be generated, which will provide “hot links” to the folder locations managed by Valet (like a unified Explorer view).

• Valet includes a Search Function based on its own Activity Log, where the result can show not only the Activity (creation, archiving, deletion), but when the action was performed and by whom.

Valet

Valet provides a level of standardization applied to the creation and life cycle of folders on your shared network drives (or even on local drives) that reduce the clutter and difficulty of locating information about central business functions (objects), such as clients, employees, projects and an unlimited number of other like options.

We have recently updated Valet with new features and compatibility with Vista. If you’d like a demo of the product, or pricing, please contact us, we’d be delighted to help.