Tag! Metadata Made Easy in Vista

Just in time for Halloween, a scary story about metadata! Who knows what awful, incriminating secrets lie hidden in your Word document's metadata, waiting to betray you? After all, isn't that why attorneys request "native format" document production? So they can revel in the smoking guns buried in your metadata that you never even knew you were transmitting?

It wasn't supposed to be this way. And in Vista, it isn't.

Metadata is supposed to help the user. And Vista makes it easier than ever to view and edit a document's metadata, search using metadata, and remove document metadata - all without having to launch the underlying application that created the file (like Word, Excel or PowerPoint).

It can also be part of a larger "Manage in Place" strategy for e-discovery. Step One is simply making the end users aware of the metadata they generate, and Step Two is giving them an easy tool to edit it. Just another little way to make it easy to categorize documents in-place, and reduce the amount of unnecessary, discoverable data lying around your network.

So how do I make it easy to view metadata in Vista's Windows Explorer?

First off, here's a quick overview of all the enhancements to Windows Explorer in Vista:

https://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/explorers.aspx

We're primarily interested in the new "Details" pane at the bottom of the explorer. By right-clicking on the pane, you can choose to make your view Small, Medium, or Large. Here's a screenshot of the Details pane set to display "large" amounts of metadata.

metadata1

(Thanks to the Windows Live Writer beta team, which made putting this screenshot into my blog incredibly simple).

As you can see, it's easy to view the metadata associated with any file simply by clicking on it - opening is not required. Also, if you use the expanded "Details" view in Explorer, you can have any metadata field displayed, not just size and last creation date.

Next: Searching your metadata

The Search panel is in the upper-right corner of the Explorer. Of course you can type in keywords like "short-sale" or phrases like "credit default swap." By default, these searches are applied to the full text of the documents you're searching. If you want to restrict your search to just the metadata fields, begin your query with the metadata field name. For example, these are valid metadata queries:

comments: review

author: chris

And these queries can be strung together. For example, if Chris ever used the phrase "approved" or "bury it" in the comments of a document that Dave authored about Contoso, it would look like this:

Contoso author:dave comments:(“needs review” OR "fix this")

Here's a complete description of the query language built into Windows Desktop Search (built into Vista, and a free download for Windows XP) https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx

What about removing the metadata?

Ahh, the best feature of all. You can select one or several files in Windows Explorer, and right-click them and choose Properties…Details. From there you'll see the link to "Remove properties and personal information." Here's a screenshot

metadata2

(Did you notice the "Last Printed" field? Interesting…) Note that you can remove all the metadata fields, or only some of them.

Here's more information about how bulk-remove metadata from a group of files:

https://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/06605e2a-3f56-488b-8415-702813f24c791033.mspx#EQB

Best of all, Windows will even prompt you to either overwrite the original file, or create a new metadata-free version of the file.

Hopefully this post has encouraged you to embrace, or at least consider, Vista's improved metadata handling features. Even the simplest usage of metadata can be superbly helpful. For example, I review lots of PowerPoint presentations in my line of work: Simply adding the word "good" to the Comments field of the ones I liked makes it much easier to find them later.

And if you're afraid the metadata bogeymen are out to get you, you can now banish them forever with a couple of mouse clicks. Happy Halloween!