Community Server on my mind

Screencast: Easier navigation - Browse by Tags

I guess you all have seen the new Tag feature in Community Server 2.1 by now? It's a great way to categorize content all through your CS site, and then navigate by "tag clouds" to easier find what your looking for. So now we got one more way to find what we want in a CS site. We've got menus and links, search, and now tags.

Navigating or even using a tag system isn't always just straight forward IMO. On a site with many users, there's a chance that the tag collection gets a bit messy. For example, one user writes a post about installing CS 2.1, it happens to be beta 1 of CS 2.1, so he/she writes a new tag for the post "Installing CS 2.1 Beta 1". Another user writes a message on the same topic and version, but tags it "Installing". Why doesn't this user use the already existing "Installing CS 2.1 Beta 1" tag? Might be a number of reasons for that, one of them is that the tag collection has become so large that he doesn't find it. I know, there is sometimes a kind of IntelliType when typing a new tag. But I think you know what I mean, and there are users that does not look at the screen when typing.

So, do I dislike tags? No, not at all, just wanted to raise the issue that it can be a little messy sometimes. And for most kind of forums and blogs that is all right. I mean the most used tags in the tag cloud are larger in size, so mostly this takes care of it self.

When I sat down and thinking about what I should base this weeks screencast on, I was just thinking about tags. But I wanted to find a good area for usage as well. An area that might not be too obvious. So I started to play with tags within the file galleries. The file galleries, in my opionion, is a truly great feature of CS. But accoring to me, it lacks a bit of navigation/filtering/sorting options OOB. It can be hard to find what you want in a large file gallery.

So in this screencast, I created a file gallery, where I in a very structured way added tags to all the files. In this case is was all different kind of releases of CS since version 1.1 (including a service pack). I know, in real life, if many different users had uploaded these files, it would just be luck if they had structured the tags the way I did here. But more on that after the screencast.

Watch the screencast (Flash - opens in a new window)

So now that you've watched the screencast, let me talk a bit more on one of the ideas it gave me. Think of a scenario where you need a file gallery with a whole lot of files. It migh be a document library, or a shareware download site etc, where users contribute to upload files and documents. You can always get some structure with folders and add-hoc tags. But what if you want a very structured way to show this gallery? Since I am a SharePoint geek as well as CS, I was thinking Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF - the WWF site is actually a CS site it seems). What if one built a submission form for these files where a structured way to tag the submission was enforced? I know, WWF might be overkill for such a task if you just want to enforce certain tagging. But using WWF this could be expanded to an approval system for more than one approver, or multiple steps in the approval process, on top of the structured tagging.  Certain conditions in the workflow can trigger certain actions as i.e removing an old version of the file when a new one is uploaded. It could move the file to a predetermined folder depending on it's tags. And I believe, you could also have a type of actions that triggers after a certain amount of time, based on for example an existing date field.

Well, just some brainstorming from me. I haven't tried anything of the above, so it might just be geeky dreams. But I think there should be areas of synergi between WWF and CS file galleries. CS file galleries could be an even greater platform for files and documents than it is today. Add some WWF, and also CS Enterprise Search and who knows where you end up.