I’m looking for advice on the possible ways to handle hundreds and hundreds of Word 2000 documents that will be accessed from our intranet.
As a hospital, we have literally hundreds and hundreds of Word 2000 documents containing our policies and procedures. Currently a relatively small portion of those documents are available via our intranet. We simply use a table with the policy names and numbers with corresponding links to the Word documents. We aren’t using ASP pages or a database to do this. We are now ready to move many more of those documents on-line.
The first problem we have is that there is only a small number of staff at our facility with web skills. Those of us who do web development have many other responsibilities, too. So we need an easy-to-maintain process for displaying the policy title and number and linking to those Word documents. (We don’t want to convert the policies to HTML for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion.) Obviously this could be done with a database and ASP page.
This is where it gets more complicated. Policy names typically are NOT descriptive enough to locate the appropriate policy or procedure. So, we need to find a decent search method. As we all know, the tricky part of searching for information is knowing the correct word on which to search. A search for the word “nurse” would not bring up a file on “nursing education” if the word “nurse” was NOT in the file. Obviously, this is a very simplistic example.
In an HTML file, I would be able to use META keywords tag to help in searching. Since we are linking to Word documents, relying on HTML keywords is not going to work. I played briefly with typing keywords into a Word document, making them “hidden” and then searching on those “hidden” words. It didn’t work – I was unable to do a search and locate the document.
Other than creating a database with policy titles and numbers and numerous fields for “keywords”, I’m not sure what options are available. I should state that the software we have available for use is very limited. While not my preference, FrontPage is the web editor we are allowed to use. We do have the FrontPage server components available. We utilize IIS on our webserver. If I find software that isn’t expensive and could be easily shown to be secure, I might be allowed to get additional software.
Any advice on this task would be appreciated. Thanks.
