If you want to revamp your filing system, you should first sketch out an outline. What are your major categories? What sub-categories fall under them? This outline becomes your map.

Let's use my own server directory as an example. I have a category called "Organizing" - no surprise there. Under Organizing, I have the following sub-categories:

• Articles
• My Presentations
• Technology

I would refrain from having too many levels of your sub-categories. You don't want to have so many sub-folders under a category that you only have one document filed in it. It's the equivalent of having a file folder with one piece of paper.

Create the folders and systematically drop files into the folders. Depending on how many documents you have, this could take some time, but devoting 10 to 15 minutes a day can help you make progress.

Change the names of the documents so you can identify them and search for them easier.

Just like with paper files, you should periodically review your documents and delete the ones you no longer need. Files that served you last year may no longer be relevant this year.

• More than 90% of the students were fully set up by the end of pre-orientation.
• Account setup, network access and library orientation efforts were integrated to minimize duplication and conflicting information.
• The students were incredibly patient and gracious, even when dealing with frustrating issues.
• Support requests during the early weeks of the term have been greatly reduced compared to last year. The urgency level of the requests has also gone down.
• Sakai account access was very smooth - much easier than most of the other systems involved. This is great because Sakai is home base for most student course work.

• Wait times for the individual setup sessions with students were often long.
• A number of students had incorrect account names created due to manual typos. The accounts had to be corrected, resulting in delays and confusion.
• Email accounts were automatically created for most students, but not all. We're not sure why the automated process failed.
• The complexity of options for network connectivity and account login can be overwhelming for students.

• Allow more time for account setup. The challenge questions for VPN and password self-service take an especially long time to set up.
• Simplify the connectivity options inside the School. Do we need different network access privileges inside the classrooms and in the student computer areas? It's difficult for students to understand why they have to change their connection approach just because they moved to a different room.
• Establish a baseline for supported student operating systems. We found that students had various flavors of XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS. In some cases our most experienced support people weren't able to set up WiFi due to quirky configurations.