submitted by ADV Guest Blogger ~ Susan McClellan, Marketing Manager for Esquire, Inc.

What is Metadata? Before determining how your business is going to manage metadata, it is important to understand some basic facts about document metadata.

Succinctly defined, metadata is “data about data.” Metadata is embedded in all Microsoft Office documents Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint include automated features to aid in document production and collaboration. These features embed electronic information (metadata) in a file, which can reveal the identity of those who edited the document (revision authors); track the time, date, and frequency of edits (track changes and revisions); reveal inserted comments and the document template; and other data employed to control the document’s text and format.

The metadata contained in a Word document doesn’t necessarily create risk of adverse disclosure. In fact some document metadata is necessary for formatting or for automation macros within a document. Some document metadata, such as tracked changes, may be used to collaborate with co-authors, but one might not wish to share such information with one’s adversary or client. The commonly held opinion is that information should be removed before a file is shared outside a business’s electronic walls to avoid violating client privilege, disclosing sensitive information to third parties and so on.

iScrub is an enterprise metadata management software. The software a business uses to clean metadata should be flexible enough to execute internal metadata policies, automated enough to enforce those policies and easy enough for users to understand and utilize.

There are times when a user may want to send out a document with tracked changes intact, but with old author information removed from the document. Another time a user may want to remove all metadata from a document, and convert it to PDF to prevent any further edits. With iScrub you can set up different levels of “scrubbing” for your users to provide these options.

A business’s metadata policy will be more successful if staff can grasp what metadata is, when it can be useful, when it can be harmful and can easily manage the metadata in documents.

For more information on iScrub go to http://www.esqinc.com/section/products/2/iscrub.html

To learn more about metadata go to our news page which has links to several published articles on metadata: http://www.esqinc.com/section/products/2/iscrub.html

Education Partners Inc., one of ADV’s prized training relationships, announces Word Enhanced Ribbon!

Word ER is a set of customizations to the Word 2010 and Outlook 2010 environments that help users work more efficiently within the new ribbon-based user interface. Eureka! It’s here!

I have wee-children.  A job.  A husband who perpetually looses his glasses.  I have a more than 3 things per day that need my attention, and despite the best of intentions, I cannot stay up past 9pm without a caffeine IV.   In result, the fastidious, hyper-organized (and admittedly, judgemental) habits of my 20′s have given way to a type of controlled chaos in my 30′s.  The stacks of paper, the 1087 unread emails, the 1 folder on your C:\ drive that has become a universal dump: ahhhhh…I see.  You just had better things to do with your time.  NOW I get it. 

But I’m right-brained.  Though trained as a creative, I am prone to think and do ”outside the box”, so long as the box resides comfortably inside a larger, well-defined parameter (a parameter that is, perhaps, electrified or sporting some sort of barbed wire).  I may have artsy thoughts, but I’m tidy in nature, and have gone a bit soft.  So be it.  But what about the left-brainers?  The creative think tanks and big picture visionaries, who look to the future while unable to see their desktop?  What tools, in the name of productivity, do they have to fall back on when they need to reel it on in?  From experience, I know: there is extreme euphoria lost when diving into that 1-dump C:\ drive, trying to reconstruct the paper trail of a brilliant idea. 

So I pose the question: document and records management solutions – how can we cater to the creative?  The graphic, interior and architectural designers, branding and advertising firms, studio artists and fashion design houses.  These are huge industries that produce huge (I daresay, excessive) amounts of documentation, oftentimes with gajillion-byte file sizes.   How can dm, rm and content management solutions cater to their file types (AutoCad, Revit, SketchUp, InDesign to name a few)? 

Most importantly: could the brilliant, left-brain content management resolutions we come up with get plugged during Project Runway?