Video Tutorial: Top 5 Methods for Tagging Content in AVAIL

Learn how to utilize an efficient tagging system to improve searchability and user experience

FAQ: What is the best way to tag content in AVAIL?

Introduction

Evan Knowles provides a quick tutorial on how to add and edit tags in the AVAIL Desktop,  highlighting AVAIL's flexible tagging system, which aims to streamline content management and improve searchability for users.

Key Takeaways:

• AVAIL's tag system allows for faster and more convenient searching compared to traditional folder hierarchies.
• There are five main methods to add tags in AVAIL:
  • Bulk tagging during import
  • Converting folder names to tags
  • Using file type handlers
  • Manual tagging
  • Automated tagging with AVAIL Stream
• Bulk editing and reorganizing tags is crucial for maintaining an effective search environment.
• Advanced tagging allows for contextual searching (over location-based search).
• Tagging allows content to be easily discoverable without users needing to know its exact location.
• The Filters Panel in AVAIL displays key-value pairs for efficient content filtering, and users can customize the number of visible keys to suit their needs.

Transcript:

In this video, we're going to talk about tags, so metadata that is attached to your content that helps you search for content in a much faster and convenient way, then folders and routing through the folder hierarchy. I'm going to talk about a couple of things. I'm going to talk about how tags get added to your AVAIL environment and how to edit them. Let's start with indexing content. In order to get content into AVAIL manually, it's pretty simple. You can go into your folder hierarchy and decide what you want to drag in. If I go into my family's and let's say I want to pull it in this windows folder, anything in that folder, just drag it over. What it's going to do is it's going to take me through a set of steps and it's going to ask me what file types want to bring in, if I want to filter anything.

And here's what I want to get to, which is adding tags to this with this process. So you can add them in a bulk manner to the entire folder. If I just want to say this is new content, I can add that and that tag will be attached to all the files that come in from that folder. And I really want to bring your attention to this checkbox down here. So this checkbox is there for you to bring in your folder names as tags. We understand that you've probably spent a lot of time with your name, your convention, creating your folder hierarchy, and constructing that and we don't want any of that work to go to waste, so you can bring in those folder names as tags. Right off the bat, it's pretty simple to get a good amount of tagging in on that content when you're bringing it in manually.

You're going to head down and it's going to bring it in, I'm not going to do that because that content is already in this channel. And when you bring in all that content, your filters panel is going to look up something similar to this. Now some of this is customized to our demo, but this is going to be what your filters panel will look like, so those tags that I added manually will be here. The folder names will come in as keywords. And the next place I want to talk about where tags come from is our file type handler. So we have file type handlers, especially for Revit with Revit content, we can pull out for parameters and you can make those, some of your tags and filters, you can choose. We would default to some of the most important ones, but you can add however you'd like to those tags.

So that's another way. And again, what we're trying to do here is make it as easy as possible for when you bring in content for tags to come along with it and some of that is automated, some of that is not. But at the end of the day, if you want a really great search environment, you're going to need these metadata and tags to be in your environment for your team. So those are three ways right there. So again, to recap, it's when you bring in the content in, you can add them in a bulk manner. You can bring in the folder names. We have file type handlers. The fourth way is manually here, so you can select any content you want. You can right-click on it and you can add tags. So again, I can just add, let's say new content. I'm going to click okay and whenever I need to find that, that has been added and that's going to show up.

That's the fourth way. And then the fifth way is an automated tool that comes with our enterprise package called Stream. AVAIL Stream is an automation tool that publishes content based on a set of rules into AVAIL. So you basically monitor a folder or a portion of your drive with Stream and any new content that hits that portion of your network will automatically get uploaded, indexed rather into AVAIL, with the correct tags and into the channels that you want it to go into. So tagging is pretty straightforward. There are several ways to do it, there are automated ways, there are manual ways, but I wanted to layout those five specific ways the content gets into AVAIL.

Now let's say you want to edit tags. If you go over here to the left, if you're a publisher, this will be shown and this is all of the tags in this Revit 2019 channel. If I want to edit some of these, it's really pretty simple. So we brought in those folder names and again those are going to come in as keywords. And so as you begin to edit some of this stuff, you can say, well these are all classes, so let me just take off and edit these here. And you kind of gets what I'm doing here. I'm really just cleaning this data up. Okay, so I did that and then I can multi-select these keys, I can edit them, I can just say, these are classes. Just put the class. I'm going to click okay.

And I have now edited those key-value pairs and they are going to show up down here in the filters panel. Here they are. And you can drag these up to the top and show them. Here's another cool thing to notice is right now I'm showing eight keys. Let me see their key-value pairs and if I want to show because I just added that one, it's important for my team, I just come over here, click nine and now when I go to this channel, you're going to see that that is nowhere.

That was pretty easy to add those. It was pretty easy to clean that data up. And I wanted to make sure that you understand how to edit these tags in this filters panel because our view on this is contextual search. In order for a search to be effective, it can't be based on location, that's not very scalable. Your designer should never have to worry about where content is, they should just be thinking about contextual clues about the content, and they should be able to filter down very quickly to find that content without needing, again, worry about where it is. So that's what I wanted to cover in this short video.

Thanks for watching it.