Meta data, meta data, meta data. *sigh* The biggest war that we, as Information Technology workers fight every day. How can we make all of that data floating around out there on our networks MEAN something? How can we get metrics based on Author, Title, Subject, Related Topics. How can we relate disparate objects like Word processor documents, spreadsheets, email etc. in a meaningful and searchable way.

In response to these questions, there are many, many ways to go about it. Actually, it is usually a combination of various methods enforced by the TOP level of management that usually gets things accomplished.

At our shop, I showed some of the suits the usefulness of saving emails to specific folders in exchange to allow a powerful crawler to crawl through them and categorize and catalogue them, and to allow for searching against not just the content of the emails, but the meta-data attached to them. Author, Author's department, Title, MEANINGFUL subject lines, and attachments whose author's filled out those pesky "About the Author" tabs in Microsoft Products.

Use meta tags, XML documents, good search engines (like verity, not site server...), File servers with well thought out taxonomies, well structured databases, and applications and application developers that are dedicated to keeping data meaningful and structured.

Just like security, there is obviously no one product that will solve this problem, but a process, intelligently designed and patiently implmented, will set us down the road to success.

Good luck.

C-.

In reply to Re: Filing Emails by cacharbe
in thread Filing Emails by Gremlin

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