Significance of Document Numbering?

[Fred Ridder]

Michael Ronquillo asked:
 
> What are your thoughts on document numbering? Important? Not so
> important? What's the value of it?
 
>From the user's standpoint, document numbering has little value or 
utility over a conventional document title combined with a version 
number or publication date.
 
Document numbering is primarily of value to your company's internal
processes, incluidng development, production, product release, 
publishing (e.g. to a website) and archiving. How much value they 
add depends on the size of your company and the maturity/complexity
of the company's processes. If you are part of a small company,
are the only writre, and support only a few products, document 
numbers may not offer much advantage. But if you are part of a 
pubs department that has to feed deliverables into a manufacturing
process (or even if you have to hand off your documents to another
group for publication to your company's website), document numbers 
are extrememly valuable for uniquely identifying a specific version 
of a specific information product without relying on anyone's parsing
and interpreting the significance of a multi-word title. The number
need not have any semantic significance (in fact, it is often *very*
difficult to develop an information taxonomy that will remain valid as
a company and its information products evolve), since it's primary
purpose is to provide unambiguoius identification that the information
product matches the BOM or the publication order or the DVD build
specification. 
 
Just my $.02, but based on 15 years of using doc ID numbers versus
10 years of not using them.
 
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