Strategies for Document Management

The Current Approach

Apple, Microsoft, and Google all are marketing software that is designed to facilitate document retrieval. Apple claims that its Spotlight search tool “can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type” (Apple, 2009). Moreover, they claim “you always find what you are looking for, even if you don’t know where to look.” Microsoft and Google make similar claims for their desktop search engines (Google, 2009b; Microsoft, 2009). Google promotes that its search tool “puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks” (Google, 2009b).

These claims are quite impressive, and might lead one to believe that the document management problem has been solved. The claims are even more impressive when one stops to consider that the individual or company that owns the documents does not need to add any metadata or structure to the documents before storing them. In fact, for these search engines both organization and format are irrelevant. The artifacts (files, emails, contacts, images, calendars, music, etc.) simply have to be stored on a device accessible by a personal computer or a server. It makes no difference whether the documents are placed in a single folder, or stored in an elaborate hierarchical structure. The presumption is that between the content itself and the artifact’s metadata (owner, date created, size, file type, etc.), there is sufficient information to enable retrieval.