Blogcast: Tagging in the 2007 Office authoring experience

Renewing my commitment to recording the demos that I find myself doing frequently, I've recorded this one about tagging.  We used to talk about metadata as the term for this - that is data about data - but I've noticed that people now refer to it as tagging, what with the rise in "folksonomies" such as web 2.0 sites like flickr and youtube.  It is also how Vista refers to it.

Now, tagging is an age old problem in the world of document management.  Without tags it is very hard to create any kind of structure about the way documents are stored and managed.  Tags are great for ensuring that searches are more targeted too.  The issue is that after you have sweated over a document you just want to save it up to the company document system and get on with the next job.  Most vendors of document management systems use some sort of web portal to upload the document and while they are at it, force you to enter all the tagging and categorisation.  This is a right pain in the bum though and is why Aardvark Adventures (or whatever is at the top of the picklist) has so many documents. 

A better way is to integration the collection of tags into the authoring experience itself and because we write the client application as well as the server, we are in a stronger position than our competitors to make this easier for the author.

The other point I want to get across here is the power of content types and also the way we can imbed powerful InfoPath forms into the document to manage the tag collection.  All of this integration is easy because of the unified vision of the Microsoft Office system.  Again, it's the way all the applications are designed to work together that makes the 2007 release so powerful.

Hope you find it useful - I do recommend watching it on "fast" speed as an efficient way to listen to me :-)

Tagging in 2007 (15 mins): (full screen version)  play

For my other demos, click on the blogcast category.