If file location will become less important,
what can you use to take its place as a basis for file organization?
Content seems like a pretty good place to start. After all, it’s what’s
inside the documents that really matters. For example, suppose that
you’re working on the Penske account. It’s a pretty good bet that all
the Penske-related documents on your system actually have the word Penske
inside them somewhere. If you want to find a Penske document, a file
system that indexes document content sure helps because then you need
only do a content search on the word Penske.
However, what if a memo or other
document comes your way with an idea that would be perfect for the
Penske account, but that document doesn’t use the word Penske
anywhere? This is where purely content-based file management fails
because you have no way of relating this new document with your Penske
documents. Of course, you could edit the new document to add the word Penske
somewhere, but that’s a bit kludgy and, in any case, you might not have
write permission on the file. It would be far better if you could
somehow identify all of your documents that have “Penske-ness”—that is,
that are directly or indirectly related to the Penske account.
This sounds like a job for metadata, and that’s
appropriate because metadata is all the rage these days, particularly on
the Web. At sites such as Flickr.com and del.icio.us, surfers are
categorizing the data they find online by applying descriptive
keywords—called tags— to the objects they come across. Social software—
software that enables users to share information and collaborate
online—makes these tags available to other users, who can then take
advantage of all this tagging to search for the information they need.
At the del.icio.us site, for example, users bookmark interesting pages
and assign tags to each site, and those tags can then be searched. This
is called social bookmarking. Certainly, metadata is nothing new in the Windows world, either:
Digital photo files often come with their
own metadata for things such as the camera model and image dimensions,
and some imaging software enables you to apply tags to pictures.
In Windows Media Player, you can download album and track information that gets stored as various metadata properties: Artist, Album Title, Track Title, and Genre, to name just a few.
The last few versions of Microsoft Office have supported metadata via the File, Properties command.
For
all file types, Windows XP displays in each file’s property sheet a
Summary tab that enables you to set metadata properties such as Author, Comments, and Tags.
What’s different in Vista is that metadata is a more integral part of
the operating system. With the new Windows Search Engine, you can
perform searches on some or all of these properties . You can also use them to create virtual folders, file stacks, and file filters .
As you saw earlier, Windows Explorer displays some of a document’s metadata in the Details pane . To edit a document’s metadata, Vista gives you two methods:
In the Details pane, click the property
you want to edit. Vista displays a text box in which you can type or
edit the property value. Click Save when you’re done.
Right-click the document and click Properties to display the property sheet, and then click the Details tab. As you can see in Figure 1,
this tab displays a list of properties and their values. To edit a
property, click inside the Value column to the right of the property.
Note
By default, in most folder windows Vista displays the Tags
and Author properties in Windows Explorer’s Details view. (Specialized
folders such as Music, Pictures, and Videos display other properties in
Details view.) To toggle a property’s column on and off, right-click any
column header and then click the property. Click More to see a complete
list of the available properties.
Putting
metadata at the heart of the operating system is a welcome innovation.
Throw in the capability to sort, group, stack, filter, and create search
folders based on such metadata, and few would dispute the value of this
enhanced file system.
It’s also a good thing that metadata is easy to
implement for individual files, but will people get into the habit of
adding metadata for each new document that they create? Time will tell,
but it’s certainly true that metadata has been underutilized so far. I
think people will have to be convinced that taking a little time now to
add metadata will save them more time in the future because the metadata
makes documents easier to find and manage. It also helps if software
vendors can make it easier for users to add metadata to documents.
Having to switch over to Windows Explorer to add or edit metadata is not
a big productivity booster. Instead, I hope Vista-aware programs will
offer metadata-friendly interfaces and prompt for properties when users
save new documents.
Note
The latest versions of Microsoft Word have a
feature that, when enabled, prompts you to enter document metadata. In
Word 2003 or earlier, select Tools, Options; display the Save tab; and
activate the Prompt for Document Properties check box. Now, after you
save a new document, Word displays the Properties dialog box
automatically. Alas, this useful option appears to have been deleted
from the Word 2007 interface, although it’s still accessible via a
macro:
Sub PromptForPropertiesInWord()
Application.Options.SavePropertiesPrompt = True
End Sub
A much bigger problem is applying
metadata to existing documents. I have thousands of them, and you
probably do, too. Who has the time or motivation to set even just a few
property values for thousands of old files? Nobody does, of course, and I
suspect most of us will simply ignore the vast majority of our existing
files (after all, we might never use 95% of them again) and move
forward into the metadata future.
