Hello everyone! After months of rewriting, we are proud to announce the release of Tabbles 4.1, with a completely rewritten engine. The result is a huge speed improvement (Tabbles is now 3-10 times faster). If you frequently had timeout errors, now you should not have them anymore.

This is big news for some customers who had a huge number of files and were experiencing timeouts as soon as they tried to open a tag with more than 75,000 file or so. After rewriting the engine, we are sure that Tabbles can handle at least 300,000 files in each tag without timeouts—even when you try to combine such tags or add filters. Of course this also depends on the Tabbles mode you are using (these numbers are for Tabbles Lan and Tabbles Local. Tabbles Cloud will of course be less performing), on your server performance, and on your Sql Server version (we did not yet try Sql Server Express, but the result should be comparable).

We also have fixed some bugs (see the changelog).

We would also like to apologize for disregarding many support requests, both in the forum and via email, but we have been completely absorbed by this rewrite. Fortunately, the problem of timeouts with huge amounts of files is now gone. We could say that Tabbles 4 is now as it should have been from the start: feature-complete, bug-free, and fast. Unfortunately, with our limited resources, we were not able to actually reach this objective until today.

Now that our objective is finally achieved, in what direction do we mean to let Tabbles evolve in the future? We are currently considering to integrate Tabbles with Sharepoint. This way we could automatically exploit many features of Sharepoint without implementing them: 1) remote storage of documents; 2) being able to tag not only files but any concept (customers, purchases, etc); 3) versioning; 4) workflows; 5) having strongly typed tags such as “date” tags or “user” tags. So that’s the direction where we’ll probably push Tabbles in the future. In the meantime, of course, we will also keep maintaining Tabbles 4 and adding customizations for customers. We will also implement some missing features and fix some minor bugs that remain. As usual, check this blog for updates, and see you next time!