Every project makes two kinds of file. Only one of them belongs in the register — and the other one is where the project actually lives.
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Zepth Core module
Two tiers
controlled documents and working files — different rules, different homes, one platform
Zepth information model
A doctrine card, and this page’s argument. Drawings, specifications and contracts need numbering, revision control and distribution records. The site-visit photos, the draft report, the calculation working and the supplier brochure need none of that — and putting them through it is how a register stops being useful.
One boundary
and it is crossed on purpose — a working file becomes a controlled document because somebody decided it had
Zepth information model
Not automatic, and it should not be. A document becomes controlled at the moment a human is prepared to be accountable for it. A system that promotes files by itself has taken that decision away from the person who has to answer for it.
Zepth Drive is the project’s shared file workspace: folders, working files, reference material, and everything that is not — or is not yet — a controlled document. Stored with the project, rather than scattered across personal drives, inboxes and chat threads.
It runs on the same permission model as the rest of the record, and it sits deliberately beside the document register rather than inside it. Two tiers, one boundary, and the boundary is the point.
A drawing is a controlled document. It carries a number, a revision, a status code and a distribution record, because somebody will build from it and everybody needs to know they built from the right one. That machinery is what the document register exists for, and it is not optional.
Most of what a project produces is not that. The photographs from Tuesday’s site visit. The draft of a report that is not issued yet. The consultant’s calculation working. The supplier’s brochure. The deck from the coordination meeting. The spreadsheet somebody built to check somebody else’s numbers.
Run all of that through the register and you have not applied rigour — you have destroyed it. A register with four thousand entries, of which two hundred are documents anybody will ever build from, is a register nobody trusts and nobody reads. The rigour only means something because it is applied to the things that need it.
“A register that swallows every file drowns. A workspace that pretends to be a register is a lie with a version number on it.”
So where do the other files go? Onto personal drives. Into email attachments. Into a WhatsApp group. Onto somebody’s phone, and then onto their next phone.
These files are real, they are load-bearing, and they are invisible to the project. The calculation that justified a design decision sits in the OneDrive of a consultant who left in March. The presentation that everybody refers to as “the final one” exists in four versions across five inboxes, and nobody can say which. The photographs of the reinforcement before the pour are on a phone that got wet.
The knowledge-loss argument that /modules/project-email/ makes about correspondence applies to files without a word of modification, and so does the discovery argument. A project workspace survives the people who worked in it. A personal drive is on loan, and it goes home with them.
The reason working files end up on personal drives is rarely defiance. It is friction. If putting a file where the project can see it takes longer than emailing it, it gets emailed — and then it forks, and the fork nobody kept is the one that mattered.
So the workspace has to be easy in the way a personal drive is easy, and governed in the way a personal drive is not. Zepth Drive shares the project’s permission model: role-based access, control per folder, and an audit trail on access and change. Sharing happens inside the record rather than as an attachment that immediately becomes an untracked copy on somebody else’s laptop.
That is the whole trade. Easy to use is not the opposite of governed. It is the precondition for it, because an ungoverned file is what you get when governance is inconvenient.
A file matures. The draft becomes the issued report. The markup becomes the revision. The working calculation becomes the one that gets submitted. At that moment it stops being a working file and becomes a controlled document, and it should pick up numbering, revision control and a distribution record from that point forward.
Be clear about what that is today: it is a deliberate act, not a button. Somebody registers the matured file as a controlled document, and its working history stays where it is, traceable. We are not going to describe an automatic promotion we have not built.
And on reflection, automatic is the wrong instinct anyway. A document becomes controlled at the moment a human is prepared to be accountable for it. A system that decides that on its own has quietly taken the decision away from the person who will have to answer for it — which is exactly the accountability the register exists to record.
What Zepth does change is the cost of the crossing. Both tiers live in one platform, under one permission model, in one search. So promoting a file is a decision, rather than a migration between two systems that were never designed to talk.
A file in a folder is a file in a folder. A file attached to the record it supports is evidence.
The photographs attach to the inspection they document. The calculation attaches to the RFI it answers. The deck attaches to the meeting whose minutes reference it. Two years later, the question is never “where is that file” — it is “what was the basis for this decision”, and that question is only answerable if the file is standing next to the decision.
This is the same argument /modules/photos/ makes about metadata, one level up: what makes a file useful is not the file. It is everything around it.
Zepth Drive is not the controlled tier of the common data environment, and this page will not blur that. /modules/document-register/ is the register: numbering, revisions, status codes, controlled distribution. Drive is everything the project produces that is not that.
It is also not a replacement for the storage tools your organisation already runs. Zepth connects to the cloud storage platforms teams use, and the argument here is not that those tools are bad — it is that they are not project-scoped. A generic drive has no idea what an RFI is, whose approval a file is waiting on, or which project a leaver’s folder belonged to. That is a difference in scope, not in quality.
Every project gets a governed file home inside the same platform as its documents, its workflows and its records: project-scoped folders structured the way the team actually thinks — by discipline, by package, by zone — with role-based permissions per folder, browser previews of the common project formats, search across the workspace, and an audit trail on access and change.
Storage is included and not metered, which matters more than it sounds. Quota anxiety is one of the reasons teams retreat to personal drives, and a workspace people are afraid to fill is a workspace people do not use.
The files that are not controlled documents stop living on personal drives, where they are invisible to the project and leave with the person who made them.
The register stays a register — rigorous because it is applied only to the things that need rigour.
A file sits next to the record it supports, so “what was the basis for this decision” has an answer two years later.
Governance is easier than the workaround, which is the only condition under which governance actually happens.
Storage is included and not metered, so nobody retreats to a personal drive to avoid a quota.
Structured by discipline, package or zone — the project’s own architecture, set at mobilisation rather than imposed after the files have already scattered.
Role-based access, control per folder, and an audit trail on access and change. The same model that governs everything else on the record — not a second one to maintain.
The common project formats open in the browser, without desktop software and without downloading a copy that immediately becomes untracked.
Attach a file to the inspection, RFI, meeting or activity it supports — so it is findable from the decision it informed, not only from the folder it sits in.
Find files across Drive and the register together, because the person looking does not know, and should not need to know, which tier a file is in.
Not metered. Quota anxiety is one of the reasons teams retreat to personal drives, and a workspace people are afraid to fill is a workspace people do not use.
Folder architecture set before the files arrive — by discipline, package or zone, mirroring how the team thinks. A structure imposed after the fact is a structure nobody follows.
Files created, uploaded and shared in the workspace, with role-based permissions and browser previews. Sharing happens inside the record, not as an attachment that forks the moment it is sent.
Photographs to the inspection. Calculation to the RFI. Deck to the meeting minutes. A file next to its decision is evidence; a file in a folder is a file in a folder.
When a working file becomes a controlled document, it is registered as one, and picks up numbering and revision control from that point. A human makes that call, because a human has to answer for it.
Find a file by what it is about and what it is linked to, not just by what somebody happened to name it — across the workspace and the register together, because the person searching does not know which tier it is in.
The four files called “final” that are not the same file. Grouped for a human to consolidate, because only a human knows which one was actually used.
Working files that behave like issued documents — final-looking revisions being circulated outside the register — flagged for someone to look at. The agent raises the question; a person answers it.
Files that are heavily used and linked to nothing, proposed for attachment to the inspection, RFI or meeting they clearly belong to. A file next to its decision is worth several times a file in a folder.
The engineer’s judgment stays in charge; the AI removes the latency and the blind spots.
What is in the workspace and what it is attached to — including the files attached to nothing, which are the ones that will be hardest to explain later. Access and change, audited, per folder and per file. Version sprawl: where the same document exists several times under slightly different names. Promotion candidates: working files circulating as though they were issued. And storage in use, reported for information rather than as a threat, because a workspace people are afraid to fill is a workspace they will quietly stop using.
The register holds controlled documents: numbered, revisioned, statused, formally distributed — the things people will build from. Drive holds everything else the project produces: working files, drafts, reference material, site photographs, calculations, decks. Two tiers, one boundary. Putting the working files through the register does not make the project more rigorous; it makes the register useless.
Read the full answerThose are good tools, and Zepth connects to them — see the integrations section of the FAQ. The difference is scope, not quality. A generic drive has no idea what an RFI is, whose approval a file is waiting on, or which project a leaver’s folder belonged to. Its permissions mirror your company, not your project — and on a project, half the people are not in your company.
Storage is included and not metered — your documents, drawings and project data live in the platform without a storage charge. We do not describe it as unlimited, because that is a different promise and we would rather say the true one. See Pricing: you pay for the modules you use, not for the seats or the gigabytes.
Read the full answerThe project’s own role-based permissions, applied per folder and per file, with an audit trail on access and change. It is the same permission model that governs the rest of the record rather than a second one to keep in step. And sharing happens inside the record, so a file does not fork into an untracked copy the moment somebody sends it.
It is registered as a controlled document and picks up numbering, revision control and distribution records from that point, with its working history preserved. Today that crossing is a deliberate act by a person, not an automatic promotion — and that is the right way round: a document becomes controlled at the moment somebody is prepared to be accountable for it.
Read the full answerThe common project formats open in the browser without desktop software — documents, images, PDFs, and drawings and models through the platform’s viewer. The point of previewing rather than downloading is that a downloaded copy is an untracked copy, and untracked copies are how the version everybody worked from stops being the version anybody can find.
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