Re-organizing your organization’s drive: a detailed example

Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive: all wonderful tools for personal use, but working in growing teams, lead to increased clutter.

When working with 2–3 people, your drive is still contained; you’d be able to mostly find what you’re looking for, and if not, you’d probably know who to ask.

That is not the case for larger teams. As the team grows, and more and more content is added, things inevitably get lost. A 100-person company is likely to have a few hundred folders and subfolders, with well over 10,000 files. What a mess!

The reason for this is the hierarchical folder structure, and the fact that everyone uses different logic and terminology for organizing content. Sure, you can try to train everyone to work uniformly, but to be honest, that’s just a lost cause. Could technology help?

TagBox is a tool designed to declutter your shared content, while allowing everyone to keep working as they see fit.

Here’s how you can start getting organized in a few simple steps:

Case study: X electronics company drive

Let take a look at X electronics’ marketing team. They have 176 folders and subfolders, and roughly 2000 files. Not huge, but just enough to start getting lost.

Step 1: sync and auto-tag

Once you connect your Google Drive, TagBox lets you sync selected folders. These will get re-synced every few hours, so that you always have all the data you need.

During the sync, your files will get automatically tagged according to your existing folder structure, file names, and content.

The switch from folders to tags is extremely important, as the flat tagging system means you don’t need to navigate through an intricate folder tree.

Tags are also very powerful because they connect similar content found in different folders. In most organizations, you might have multiple folders named “research”, or “reports”. While classic folders hide these connections, tagging exposes them and makes it much easier to find your content.

Step 2: ✨AI magic✨!

The issue with tags, manual or automatic, is that they rely on content created by humans. And humans, naturally, use different names when creating their content.

One person on your team might have a ‘clients’ folder, while another calls it ‘customers’. One person might have ‘agreements’, while another has ‘contracts’.

The key to organizing your files is to make up for these discrepancies. Here’s how we do it:

TagBox’s bots scan your files and find these similar-but-different tags, and suggests ways you can improve them.

First, it looks for folder names you should split into multiple tags. Here, for example, you can see how a folder name “iPhone SE gen 2 documents” is split so into “iPhone”, “SE gen 2”, and “Documents”, so that you can later filter and see all of your “documents” in one place.

Then, TagBox offers tags you might want to merge. See how it recognizes that “phone” and “phones” are similar (but “iPhones” are different!), and that “images” and “photos” should be tagged together.

Also, note that the system only suggests these improvements — the actual decision of how you want to tag your files is up to you!

Step 3: collaborate

Now that your content is synced and tagged, your team can finally find that presentation from last week’s meeting, or that research report from the guy that quit last year.

Instead of 176 folders, we now have 41 tags, which is a lot more manageable for any team. These differences are even more substantial for larger teams with more content.

Step 4: teach the machine

As time passes, you can manually update the tags for specific tags, rename your tags or remove unnecessary tags.

As the auto-tagging bots use the existing tags to predict tags for new content, your input actually teaches the AI and the systems learn to tag content according to your preferences.

See it in action:

As teams grow and as remote work becomes more common, collaborating can make the difference between good and amazing results. If you’re interested in organizing your team’s content, sign up at tagbox.io for a free trial, or email us directly at hello@tagbox.io.