atw: Re: Helping users find your docs via search engines
- From: "Brian Clarke" <brianclarke01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 20:24:28 +1000
Hi Michael,
In some establishments, it is very difficult to enter such data as Title or
Author because the IT department has decided such fields are not editable by
the workers, ie, you and me. In others where I have been employed, people had
been imbibing for so long at the MS-DOS pottie, that all they could do was
generate 8-character Filenames, that were almost completely unintelligible to
anyone else.
Brian.
----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Edward Granat
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 10:20 AM
Subject: atw: Re: Helping users find your docs via search engines
Hi Stewart (Walker).
As a long time advocate of intelligent document management systems, one very
quickly discovers the nightmare that document searches can become when people
use meaningless file names, stored in an illogical and unintuitive directory
structure, especially where people don't bother to fill in the document
properties metadata in MS Office and many other file formats. (In my
experience, most people don't even bother to change the Author field, perhaps
to
avoid responsibility for their awful documents, further down the track.)
Anyway, I just wanted to pitch in and say that filling in that metadata is
important, unless you want a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" scenario with finding
every file. If you remember, the safest place to store the most dangerous
object (in this case, The Ark of the Covenant) was in a government warehouse
/
file store where, unlabelled, nobody could ever relocate it, except by chance.
Remember: Your metadata might not meta you, but it metas to a lot of other
people!
Cheers,
Michael Granat
Write Ideas
Quoting Stewart Walker <helpfulau@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Hi all
>
> <snip>
>
> So on behalf of search engine users everywhere, I have
> a plea: every time you publish a non-HTML file that
> users will be able to discover via an intranet,
> extranet or web search engine, PLEASE ensure the file
> has a meaningful Title property.
>
> Thanks. I feel better now I've got that off my chest
> :-)
>
> Cheers
>
> Stewart
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