Sean Wallbridge
Seems everyone is trying to fix their corporate desktop strategy to help users find the data they are looking for. Besides the obvious benefits of an Intranet (especially based on one like Sharepoint Services and/or Sharepoint Portal Server), a good, standardized and simple drive letter mapping implementation will help as well. I get asked this a lot (with business startups) re: drive mappings so here’s my current thought/suggestion:
A, B, C, D – Reserved for floppies, hard disk and first CD Drive
E, F – Reserved for future (thumb drives, extra CD, etc.) Windows likes to pick the next available letter
X, Z – Reserved for backwards compatibility of scripting, etc.
H: = HOME (users personal directory) – permanent storage – (be sure to define xxGB of space allowed as a Quota)
G: = GROUP (departmental share – i.e. people in Finance would have a different G: than people in Marketing)
S: = SHARED (everyone in the company has access to this area).
T: = TEMPORARY (a scratch drive – nothing in here is backed up and is deleted/purged once a week but good for storing stuff for others to pick up – rather than saving non-important things in the S:). This drive is not nearly as important and I wouldn’t put a strong argument towards it – merely a suggestion in places where users continue to want to share MP3s (tsk tsk) or other temporary documents.