A better mousetrap

One of the interesting side effects of the rapid growth of rich media as a communications enabler is it’s influence on how this information is stored, retrieved, and managed. While most end users maintain their own file system on their computer, the truth is that most people are using their e-mail system as their primary data repository. This has already been acknowledged by most of the big e-mail suppliers (gigs of storage for everyone), the problem is that they are very storage-centric in their approach. They still fall short of providing fast, easy to use tools for end users to be able to navigate and managed what are becoming increasingly vast repositories of information. Having twenty gigs of storage is useless if you can’t find what you need when you need it.

So how do you turn this into a better mousetrap? Search engine technology is always improving, and there are a lot of Open Source options out there for those interested in rolling their own. An interesting possibility is in not only providing end-users the means to search against their entire archive, but to extract information at the sub-document level—that is, don’t return the document, just return the relevant parts of it. And if it turns out there is relevant information in other media types that have been received through e-mail, that should be delivered as well (flash files, specific Powerpoint slides, MPEGs, whatever). We’re already starting to store lots of rich media our e-mail folders, how about integrating search returns across all media, as long as the context is relevant? Now that more information is moving towards some variant of an XML framework, this is actually not too far down the road. More on this later…