I’ll tell you a personal secret: I think I’m a digital hoarder. I have over a terabyte of stored documents, pictures, videos, music and fonts on eight hard drives in my office. I’ve maxed out storage limits on every network drive assigned to me by the Microsoft datacenter. I don’t know if I really need 13,000 fonts, all of our marketing and training materials since Office ’98, and every funny picture my husband ever sent to me, but there’s NO WAY I’m giving up my 20 year collection of royalty free photos and clip art. I was a small business owner and designer too long to delete potentially useful files. In fact, I still have every creative project I ever produced. Storage is cheap, I reason, but my time, on the other hand…and so it goes.

In any case, I have amassed a massive stash of digital data in my deceptively neat office, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. Don’t we all have orphaned files abandoned out there on CDs and servers and hard drives? Don’t you wish you could get them back, doing something useful, without mounting every drive, opening every folder or Quick-Looking every file?

It used to cause me a certain amount of unrest, thinking of those files I’d squirreled away for good reason, but had lost track of – valuable assets I was wasting because I couldn’t find and use them when I needed them. For example, I scoured the web and downloaded MORE fonts (pirate themed) for Talk Like a Pirate Day because I couldn’t find the ones I knew I already had on some disk somewhere. Time suck – whoosh! Fifteen minutes gone forever.

If you have a lot of files stored on external devices – DVDs, hard drives, servers, whatever – and you’d like to get them indexed, organized, and useful again, you might like the tool I use – Microsoft Expression Media. Expression Media lets you make visual catalogs of all your files, extremely easily, wherever they are. Just drag and drop your disk to a new catalog to get started. Once you’ve created the catalog, even if the drive isn’t connected, you can still browse for and quickly find forgotten files. Don’t remember the name of the customer contract you created last year, but “you’ll know it if you see it”? No worries – you can isolate all your .doc files, and scan through them rapidly and easily. I can power through those 13,000 fonts in under a minute. Thumbnails make it easy to find the one I want; I can even open or install the file right from Expression Media. For the uber-organized, keywords and ratings can be applied to anything. For me, it’s enough to be able to group file types like .pdfs from multiple drives, and scroll through them until I find the one I want. 

Expression Media is actually a powerful Digital Asset Management application. It’s very popular with designers and photographers – lots of people I know started using it back when it was called iView. I wish I’d had it when I ran a small business – the amount of stress I could have saved myself (and my team!) with just the basic functions of Expression Media for file management would have made a difference in our productivity and bottom line.

There are so many things beyond organizing you can do with Expression Media. Create back-up copies of important files to DVD, create Silverlight-enabled web galleries and upload them automatically to your website, batch convert image, movie or sound files from one type to another (say MP3 to WAV.) But for me, the killer use has been to simply keep track of my stuff, and to help my inner packrat to be more productive and peaceful.

It’s a good tool for team collaboration too. I’ve created catalogs of all of our marketing assets like logos and photos, and shared those with people I work with. Now, instead of asking me for the umpteenth time where to find the Microsoft logo in .eps format, they can simply look at the catalog and open the file directly from the server we all share. The catalogs stay up-to-date because I enabled the folder-watching feature, so anything I add to the server gets added to their catalogs too, automatically. Catalogs are compatible with Mac and Windows, so my internal and external teams are able to share files and work together more efficiently regardless of what platform they’re on, just like Office for Mac helps Mac users work more seamlessly with Windows users on Office documents.

Our team created some videos sampling what you can do with Expression Media, especially in concert with Office 2008. These videos aren’t quite ready for prime-time, but I quickly put up a special sneak peek channel on You Tube for MacMojo readers: www.youtube.com/msmacbu.  Be sure to watch the video entitled Office 2008 Special Media Edition…extra street cred to you if you can name the Song, Band, Album & Record Label in that video. Watch it in high res if you’ve got the bandwidth, it’s much better that way. Eventually, all of these will all be available on www.microsoft.com/mac.

Are you ready to embrace your inner packrat, and gobble up a great deal this Thanksgiving day? If you haven’t upgraded to Office 2008 yet, surf the web for holiday deals on Office 2008 Special Media Edition, which includes Expression Media as well as the full, Exchange-enabled suite of Office 2008 for Mac. Great discounts are available throughout the holiday season, but Thursday, November 28th & Friday November 29th there are MASSIVE bargains available (like 75% off the normal price – you can save something like $350!) If you’re already an Office for Mac user (any version) be sure to look at the upgrade prices for an even better deal.

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for a lot of things, big and small – and one of them is the peaceful feeling I get knowing I can find what I’m looking for. Happy Holidays, everyone – may your days be merry and your media more manageable.