The Same Email

We received the following email. I understand the other site received it too. I imagine they were gracious about it.

Subject: your naming convention article

Hello,

I work in manufacturing IT in Hungary. We have 14,000 files on SharePoint, maybe half of them named wrong. I was searching for practical advice on naming conventions and I found your site and also another site that seems to be arguing with you.

I read both. I have some feedback.

Your seven rules article — very useful. I printed it. It is on the wall next to my desk. My colleagues ignore it but at least now I can point at something when they argue with me.

The other site had a good article about underscores, which I also printed. Everything else on both sites is too theoretical for my situation.

I don't need to know why naming conventions are compression algorithms. I need my colleagues to stop saving files as New Document (3).xlsx and I need approval on a folder restructure that has been in committee for nine months.

You write like you are grading papers. The other site writes like they are discovering fire. I just need to name my files.

But your list works. So thank you for that.

Best regards, T.

T., I appreciate the email. I have a few thoughts.

First: you're welcome. The list works because I wrote it to work. That's what specifications are for. You print them, you put them on the wall, you point at them when people argue. The specification does the work even when you're not in the room. That's the whole point.

Second: the nine-month committee approval for your folder restructure is not a management problem. It's a specification problem. Somewhere in that process, someone is asking "but what's the right structure?" and the committee is stalling because they don't have a framework for answering that question. They have opinions. Opinions don't converge. Frameworks do. The theoretical material you don't need is the thing that would unstick your committee. You don't have to read it. But someone in that room should.

Third: your 14,000 files named wrong — that's not a naming problem. That's eleven years of emergence. Eleven years of people making local decisions without a shared schema. Every one of those filenames made sense to the person who saved it. New Document (3).xlsx was fine for the person who knew which New Document was the right one. It stopped being fine the moment that person went on holiday. You know this. You've been cleaning up after it for a decade.

The theory you don't need is a description of what happened to you. You lived it. You don't need the description. But the next person — the one who inherits your SharePoint after you leave — might.

Fourth: "you write like you are grading papers." Fair. I'd rather be clear and condescending than warm and useless. The other site will make you feel understood. This site will tell you what to do. Both have value. You've already chosen — the list is on your wall.

Keep printing things. It's an underrated technology.