Welcome to the Wish List.
I'm like many folks, I'm always losing my documents. (Seriously) Oh, I get determined now and then and create an elaborate directory structure either on my laptop or on my company network. The problems is remembering where I put stuff... let alone where my folder is. That's how I came to develop LANdango. I found myself wanting a search engine with me in mind. I wanted something better.
About 8 years ago I found myself at a job where there were over a thousand employees in my IT department. I found my transition to the new position a challenge. Not only by the culture, but the vast amount of information I had to take in from my immediate team. I had to learn how they worked, the industry-specific language they used, the naming conventions they embrased (I'll get to that in a minute), and lastly perform the tasks at hand.
Like many companies, they too had their way of organizing the way they stored documents. They mostly were a Microsoft shop using MS Office and a few other standard desktop tools. But just like a small company, they too had challenges in finding those documents AND the finding places they needed to store new ones.
When I started there, they only had a few Windows NT servers on the network. They actually were named after the planets in our solar system. I'll never forget the office roar of laughter when folks recieved the bulk email with this subject:
"Please help our admins, we are running out of space on \\Earth."
I had it posted on my cube wall for years. I like telling that story because it holds true today... 8 years later. Administrators beg user to find and delete any folders and/or files and users just delete their email and continue about their busy daily work schedule.
In our case, administrators are forced to beg and steal to get more storage or find other methods of freeing storage. But mostly they just added more storage. Heck, drives are cheap right?
What good are 273,000 sub directories on one server path? My direct department had 45,000 of them! Let's arseume your on my team.... Go find your folders. :-)
For about three years, I was a product manager for many product under the Documentum(R) platform. Documentum is a market leader for document archival, retrieval, and search. I won't get into that product, but I do want to address one issue with such systems and the "rude reality" of documents in organizations....
It's late to finish tonight, watch for the blog entry.
But I do want to say this: LANdango's features were my wish list and I hope you'll post your wish list too. 