How to catalog and tag contents of server-directories in an enterprise enviroment for moving to an ECM?

Question

A company plans to introduce an enterprise content management system. Therefore the already available information, documents and knowledge shall be collected and analyzed to see

• which different types of information exist,
• where they can be found right now,
• who creates them,
• who edits or uses them,
• ...

Most users are using Windows XP or Windows 7 as their OS.

Are there tools which could help analyzing the existing data as described above? E. g. a software which can

• scan selected network drives,
• create a catalog of all directories, subdirectories and files and
• extract metainformation like dates of creation/modification, file size, ...
• allows to assign tags or keywords to single elements (files or directories) and
• can count documents based on their type or keywords etc.

Answer 1

I've used JAM software's Filelist.exe tool for this. See below for command line usage. You can:

• Scan network drives
• Create a catalog of all directories and subdirectories, and all files, or filter for files of multiple selected types (eg /filter *.doc?, *.xls?, *.ppt?)
• Extract Metainformation like creation, last access, last modified, by whom, size etc.
• collects document type through the extension.
• In addition to your list, you can check for duplicate files by specifying the /MD5 or /SHA256 arguments.

I collect this information and load it into a database (sqlite for me, but anything able to parse a long CSV file is good) for report generation.

FileList V2.4

Prints a list of all files in a file system branch

FILELIST [/OPTION] [/FILTER pattern1;pattern2;...] Path(s) [>list.csv]

/OWNERS        Adds a column with the file owners (slower)
/NOHEADER      Leaves out the column headers and only prints the raw data
/ATTRIBUTES    Includes the attributes that are set for each files
/MD5           Adds a column with the MD5 checksum of each file
/SHA256        Adds a column with the SHA256 checksum of each file
/AUTHORS       Additionally extracts the name of the author from MS Office
               documents
/VERSIONS      Additionally extracts the version number from binary files
               (if included)
/LASTSAVEDATE  Additionally extracts the last save date of MS Office documents
/FILTER        Allows to specify one or more filters, separated with semicolons
/MINSIZE       Allows to specify a minimum file size in Bytes. Files which have
               a size smaller than the given value will be excluded from the
               list.
/FULLPATH      Outputs full path of each file instead of separate columns for
               file name and file path
/LISTSEPARATOR Allows to set the character used for separating the columns