@scottalanmiller said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:
@Donahue said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:
the benefit I see of tags over folders is while you can nest folders, there are times when I would want a file to have more than one tag, and folders or nested folders just wont cut it. I have a good example. We have CAD drawings for standardized parts that we use on several machines we manufacture. We are currently storing two separate (but equal) copies in two folders that are next to each other in the hierarchy. One folder contains all of the standard drawings, and the other folder contains everything categorized by type and keyword, much like a tag. But it's very stupid because there is a pretty high chance for someone to update one, but not the other. A shortcut would work, but they dont do that at the moment. But tags would be perfect. On our other drawings, we could have tags for customer, machine type, year, drawn by, etc. I can see how using tags would allow for seeing and searching the data any way you want. But folders are pretty limited in what they can do, and it all hinges on having a well thought out system, and usually ahead of time. Our primary drawings are all stored by year first, and then by drawing number, which is sort of like a project number. But the drawing number is baked into the file name, and we just have folders for years. In order to find the drawing we need, you have to consult some other document that can do all the cross referencing. Its a major pain. It would be heaven to be be able to do a search that said "show me all drawings related to customer A for Product B". I bet we could do that with tags, but not with folders. You could argue that you could just setup the folders to be by customer and then by product type, but then you wouldn't get a good search for "drawn in the year 2015". You can setup folders to make any one particular search type easy, but it becomes very hard to make a good search against something that the folder structure didn't account for.
TLDR, tags ware way more flexible.
Tags also don't have a problem with things "moving" as it isn't a location, but a tag. So someone retagging a document doesn't make it "move" to applications, it just changes when it is displayed via a filter.
thats less of a point for us, our files dont move much. But they commonly would belong to probably at least half a dozen tags. Most of our folder structure is pretty poorly designed and just copied over from the times when those files existed only on a users local computer. It's hard to get 50 people to stop bad habits all at once. I have taken away the ability for people to make changes to probably the first few layers of our main storage share, but at some point the chaos resumes.
one thing I just thought of. Can you base file permissions on tags? we use folder permissions heavily.
