#namingconvention

Whether you're a motion designer, editor, or animator, a clear folder structure can save hours of confusion (and your sanity). Especially when you're working in teams, delivering to clients, or revisiting a project months later.

In this post, we break down the folder structure we use at Creative Splash, the same one that keeps our project files tidy, accessible, and stress-free.

Swipe to see how to structure your assets folder like a pro

Now here’s a subject on which we get to talk often with different clients.

I myself have came up with many different varieties in the last 15 years and every year that goes by brings a new technology that brings a new twist to this. Should it be MSIs vs AppV4.6 vs AppV5, x86 vs x64 architecture, some French products, some English products, some multilingual products: you’ll find a new surprise at every turn and you’ll keep making amendments to what you thought was the best naming there can be.

Now I have to say that the latest naming we came up with for one of our very big clients (54,000 desktops and more that 2,000 applications) really got us to tweak this very efficiently. I also have to mention that SCCM2012 really made it easy for us since the way Microsoft has organized it’s AppModel (Application vs Deployment Type) in an almost-flat fashion can be mimicked at folder level. I can say that 18 months and 2,000 packages later, this naming convention really paid up big time for them.

Let’s start by talking about SCCM2012’s AppModel: with the variety of computers we now have, Microsoft understands that it’s important for a desktop administrator to assign a computer (or a “user” in a user-centric approach) to an application, but more so to install the correct package for this given application depending on a number of factors such as computer architecture, OS language, primary device, …etc. What was previously done using scripts, launchers and wrappers, is now mainly done by creating more than 1 package for a given application, called a Deployment Type in SCCM2012, and setting an order and applying different sets of conditions for each.

As an example: you could assign Joe to WinZip v16, but depending on the PC Joe connects to he could receive the x86 or the x64 version, the French or the English edition, the MSI or the AppV5 one. In this same example, WinZip could be offered in 8 different ways: x86 French MSI, x86 French AppV5, x86 English MSI, x86 English AppV5, x64 French MSI, x64 French AppV5, x64 English MSI and x64 English AppV5. Now this is an extreme example, but in some environments it is certainly possible to find as many as 8 Deployment Types (or even more) for a single application. All of this justifies the need to come up with a solid naming convention prior to even start packaging. Don’t hesitate to invite your colleagues to “play for the red team” by bringing real-life tricky examples against it and try to punch holes in your newly found standard.

My 1st Folder Level: Since this has to work by folder structure, let’s start by looking at the very 1st folder level. Referring to the way SCCM organizes its AppModel, this first part should only contain basic information relative to the application itself. We found that 3 pieces of information are really important here: Manufacturer, Application Name and Version. To be really efficient here, you should put them in order of importance, which we found to be: Application Name, then Version, and then Manufacturer. The main reason we found that the Manufacturer made more sense being put right at the end was mainly because companies change of names, get bought out or merge with one another. As for the Application Name, even in company buy-outs/renaming/merger, the Application Name often remains as it is the way we rely to the product. It’s a branding and history shown that it doesn’t change as often as the manufacturer’s name. Having the Manufacturer at the very first part of your naming will most likely get your alphabetic ordering messed up when a change in name occur in between versions.

An example of this is again WinZip. Their version 15 was manufactured by WinZip Computing LLC, while their version 16 is now manufactured by Corel. Getting your manufacturer at the beginning would have your version 16 show up way earlier in your list since Corel starts with a “C”, while your version 15 would show up at the very end with the “W”s. Now remember that early in your packaging activities, when you have say 50 or even 100 products listed, this whack in the sorting in not so dramatic; but a few months or years from now when you have over say 1,000 products and packages, sorting plays out a great deal, especially when many different people need to browse / find products in that listing of yours.

Small quick tweaks that make it work better:

Avoid accents or special characters

Remove spaces and change every first letter of every word with an upper case

Use the underscore solely to differentiate Application Name, Version and Manufacturer

Avoid repeating the Manufacturer name in both Application Name and Manufacturer

Keep popular versionning format rather than the less known one (Ms Office 2013’s real version is 15.0.2703.1000, but who else knows this but you really?)

Try to keep a reasonable number of characters: Enough to be easy to read, but not too many to risk busting the “256 characters limits” when importing your packages in SCCM (Yes, the limit still exists!)

Here’s what it looks like when adding some products:

AcrobatPro_11.0_Adobe

AcrobatStd_11.0_Adobe

Chrome_17_Google

Chrome_28_Google

DotNetFramework_4.0_Microsoft

OfficeProPlus_2013_Microsoft

Quicktime_7.7.4_Apple

WinZip_15.5_WinZipComputingLLC