In a nutshell, what we’re looking to do is to overcome the problems inherent in a folder-based system. Remember the days of trying to locate a physical file you dropped in the wrong folder in a physical filing cabinet. In fact, I still periodically do this with invoices and other bills that our government hasn’t quite certified as evidence for tax returns.
There goes a few hours…
But electronically, it’s not too much better either — we, like everyone else, have had many problems over the years with organizing and finding files with something like Windows Explorer. One of the biggest problems being that it’s exceptionally easy to ‘lose’ files and pretty hard and time consuming to find them again.
Well — with Benubird we are trying to overcome the problems by providing users with a smart-data based file system (some would call this properties or metadata-based). We’re hoping to allow our users (ourselves included) to easily ‘smarten’ files with details such as title, author, subject, categories and tags and then use that information in the future to quickly retrieve the files using powerful filters or search.
We say that you can collect, organize and archive documents – ‘smartening’ – and then retrieve by search, tags and browsing. You could, if you wanted to, store all of your files in one Windows Explorer folder and just use Benubird to help you manage files.
Sounds pretty easy, we sure hope so…
