I’m thoroughly annoyed by the project’s Sharepoint at work. People who focus on a sub-project want all the related subfolders (execution, QHSE, engineering,…) in one overarching folder. But people who are responsible for e.g. project-wide QHSE want all the QHSE-related subfolders in one QHSE folder.

The result? A confusing mess of redundant folders and non-synced documents.

Today, I was brainstorming all the stuff I need to prepare for the pond I’m building next month, when a solution to the Sharepoint problem popped up in my mind.

Imagine a database where the folders are sorted in two dimensions instead of one.

I visualize it as a matrix, where every file is saved just once, but with two coordinates. Users can choose whether they want to set the “columns” or the “rows” as the higher parameter. That way, you can access it via two different paths.

You can see the beginning of my Pond Build task matrix below. I’m not sure if and how I will implement this, but it was a fun exercise and I’ll hang onto the idea for now.