Best Practices for Organizing Electronic Documents

This procedure applies to electronic documents, for hard copies documents you should refer to the Procedure to Apply the Records Management Program.

WHAT IS AN ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT?

An electronic document is any information recorded on a digital medium (hard disk, network drive, email, etc.) produced or received by Concordia University within the framework of its operation.

The document could take various formats, such as:

• Word Document
• Excel spreadsheet
• PowerPoint Presentation
• Email
• Pdf
• Image (jpg, tiff, png, etc.)
• Video (wav, etc.)

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT REPOSITORIES?

• P:\ is a private drive for each employee.
• Q:\ is the network drive used to share documents within a specific group or department.

BEST PRACTICES

The Records Management and Archives Department recommends to all of Concordia's employees to apply the following best practices to their electronic documents:

• Create folders and subfolders according to the categories of the classification plan.
• For each folder, follow the retention periods and destroy documents to be destroyed once a year.

The Records Management and Archives Department also recommends to all of Concordia's employees to use a different location to file their electronic documents according to their status, as follows:

Best practices for organizing electronic documents