Feature list, at a glance
It is surprising how many features a serious tagging solution must offer, in order to be really usable over the long term. Tabbles has them all. Here are the key features that make Tabbles an all-in-one, enterprise-level tagging solution.
Tag and search files, emails and bookmarks
Many tagging tools only work with some given file type, such as music files or picture files. With Tabbles, you can tag any kind of file. It is a general-purpose tagging tool.
You can add comments to files, along with your colleagues – and your comments will look like a chat! Check our blog post here.
In Windows File Explorer, you can tell tagged files at a glance, because they have a Tabbles logo.
If you right-click a file in Windows File Explorer, you can quickly tag the file from there, without need to open a Tabbles window.
With our Outlook plugin, you can find your emails quickly and intuitively by combining tags. You can also tag emails with the much easier to use Tabbles user interface, which supports nested tags, text completion, several sorting modes for tags, and much more. You can also synchronize Outlook categories and Tabbles tags.
Check out our Oulook plugin page.
Tabbles can also tag your favorite Internet URLs, using the Chrome Extension or the bookmarklet (works with any browser). This way you will be able to find old internet articles by combining tags. Other solutions (such as Firefox bookmarks) allow you to tag internet addresses, but not to combine tags to find the URL you are looking for.
Tabbles is perfectly suited for individuals and firms who produce a lot of documents, such as law firms. Here are some examples of usage: you can show all documents of a given client, regardless of the topic; you can show all documents with a given topic, regardless of the client; or you can show all documents of a given year, regardless of topic and client.
Nesting tags means that you make a tag a child of another tag. What is this for? Suppose you have the tags “animal”, “dog” and “cat”. You recognize that all dogs are also animals, and all cats are also animals. So, when you open the tag “animal”, you also want to see files tagged with “dog” and “cat”, even though you did not explicitly tag them with “animal”, but only with “dog” or “cat”.
So you need a way to tell Tabbles that any dog is also an animal, and that any cat is also an animal. And you do that by making “dog” and “cat” children of “animal”. This is the purpose of nesting tags and tag hierarchies. Another benefit of tag nesting is, of course, that it makes your tag list less cluttered, because instead of having all tags top-level you arrange them in a tree structure. (It is however a special kind of tree, because a child can have more than one parent).
Very often, when you are looking for some file, just opening a tag is not enough: there will be too many files in that tag, and it won’t be easy to find what you are looking for. What you want is to combine tags, i.e. say things like “Show the files that are pictures AND are about Mary AND are not about Tom, AND were taken in the last two years, AND have good quality, AND are urgent.”. With Tabbles, you can combine concepts as much as you like, to find exactly what you need with a bunch of clicks!
More examples: you can show all the documents of year 2010, regardless of the customer. Or you can show all the documents of a given customer, regardless of the topic. Or you can show all the documents of a given topic, regardless of the customer.
Tabbles will compute combinable tags to help you refine your search: it will suggest you how to refine your search, based on what you are looking at.
You can intersect and subtract tags as you like, creating dynamic combinations. This feature is the main reason why Tabbles exists!
When you use Tabbles, you can stop worrying folders altogether. This means that you can simply throw all new files together in a single folder. This might sound unbelievable to you: how can you possibly work without folders and subfolders? The answer is that Tabbles replaces folders and subfolders with new kinds of containers (called “tabbles”), which are similar to subfolders but are dynamically computed depending on the situation.
Of course, if you have an existing folder structure and you want to keep using it, you can do so. With Tabbles, it makes no difference at all where your files are physically located.
Automation and productivity: auto-tag, share tagging and more
Discover the power of automatic tagging.
You can tell Tabbles things like “when I put a file in this folder” or “if a file contains this word” or “if it contains a social security number”, then “give it this tag”.
- The first is useful if you have an existing folder hierarchy, or if you are naming your files in a consistent way.
- The last can be used to do data-mining: you can for example setup a bunch of rules to auto-tag files containing someone’s name, an email address or a specific string like a social security number (you can do this using regular expressions)
In any cases, auto-tagging is a powerful automation tools and can save you, and your team, tons of time.
You can see tags created by other people; you can see files tagged by your colleagues. (Of course, you can only see those things if the tag owner has shared the tags with you.)
This can be scaled to handle hundreds of interconnected machines and users: someone can tag a file on one machine, and other people on other machines will instantly see the file tagged.
Due to the centralized nature of Microsoft Sql Server, any user’s tagging operation is immediately written in the central database, so other users can instantly see the update.
For example, if some tags were added to a file by user A, user B will immediately see the tags below the file.
When you are administering a Tabbles network with many users, you want to spare your users the burden of creating tags, and putting them in a hierarchy. With Tabbles, the administrator can do all the work. He can create a hierarchy of tabbles and share it with all (or some) users. Ordinary users will see the tag hierarchy and will be able to start tagging files immediately.
- Support user-level permissions
- Support tag-level permissions
- Support group-level permissions
Tagging a file with Tabbles is even easier than putting a file in a folder. You can do it in multiple ways: all with mouse clicks, by drag-and-drop, or by typing the tag names with text auto-completion. And you can sort tags in many ways, e.g. by tree or by recent usage.
Suppose you are collaborating with someone outside the Tabbles network. You send a tagged document to him by email; he modifies the document and sends it back to you by email (or by Dropbox, or in general from the internet). In this case, the new document that you receive will have preserved the tags of the original. i.e. you won’t have to tag it again. This is possible because Tabbles embeds the tags in the files themselves, so when they are modified and sent across the internet, tags are not lost.
(This feature is only available for Microsoft Office documents).
Suppose you are looking for a file whose physical path (disk and folder) you do not remember. Tabbles allows you to find the file through the mental path that is more congenial and natural to you. For example, “pictures → birthday → with-friends → with-good-quality → taken-in-2012”. The same file might also be found by following a different mental path, such as “pictures → with-mary → with-candles”.
When you move a file with Windows File Explorer, Tabbles detects that and updates its internal database with the new path of the file. As a result, when you find the file with Tabbles, Tabbles will still be able to open it.
The same happens when you rename files with Explorer.
When you download or create a new file, you will probably want to tag it. And to tag it, you have to right-click it in the file manager (e.g. File Explorer). But locating the file in the file manager is annoying and distracts you from your work. For this reason, when a new file is created, Tabbles displays a popup box allowing you to tag it with one click, without opening an Explorer window. This feature is called “One-click Tagging”.
Tag files everywhere, even in the Cloud
Tabbles enables you and your team to tag files and folders also in a folder synchronized in the cloud:
- As long as you (and everyone sharing the Dropbox/Sharepoint or Google Drive file stream folder with) are synchronizing the folder(s) on your (their) PC, then you can tell Tabbles to “treat that folder on that PC as cloud folder”. Check the setup instructions for Dropbox/Sharepoint. or Google Drive (using file stream).
- The same process can be used for folders synchronized directly, for example with a backup server.
In corporate environments you often have huge network drives shared among all users. Tabbles helps organize the data present in these drives, avoiding file duplication, and allowing users to find what they need, even if they are unfamiliar with the folder structure. If you put a file in a network drive and you tag it, other users will find it, even if you don’t tell them where you put it. They don’t even need to know where the file is.
Some file-searching tools, or file indexers, only allow you to search in some specific file-systems, like NTFS. Others won’t search in network drives. With Tabbles, you are not tied to a specific file system or drive kind.