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As anyone who has ever lost a file or document will testify, keeping track of even a few hundred documents on a single computer can be a monumental task. In corporate environments, where the numbers of documents can be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, and the storage locations disparate, the problem becomes even more acute.

For many, an even greater consideration is not where the files are — there are many tools that can help keep track of documents — but what information is actually in them. In other words you may know where the documents are, but you may not always be completely sure of their contents.

Fortunately, for those of us who are organizationally challenged, PX Technologies created Wintility, a program designed to reduce the problem of lost productivity caused by difficult to locate and unstructured information stored in documents and other types of files.

While the original purpose of Wintility was as an organizational tool, the latest versions of the product go far beyond that single function to become content management systems that lets users capture, manage, and deliver information, documents and e-mail messages throughout the entire intranet. It allows multiple users to access their information from anywhere, at any time, through a local intranet or an Internet browser. It even allows simultaneous document sharing.

Working with Wintility is a painless process and it installs like any other Windows-based program. Right after installation, the program scans your hard disk for file types of your choice and builds a catalog of documents and files. Almost any type of file can be included in the catalog including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and graphics files. The catalogs themselves only provide references to documents — the actual documents remain saved in their original, physical locations on the disks throughout the network. These catalogs form the basis of a peer-to-peer file sharing system over the intranet/Internet.

Once the catalog process is completed, the program displays the catalog in a browseable and searchable format. In addition to regular files, you can also choose to catalog e-mail messages from mail clients like Outlook and Outlook Express, so you can search for all files and e-mail messages by keyword or topic. Because many organizations still have large quantities of paper-based materials, it's also possible to have records in the catalog that refer to hard copy publications and files. That way, when a topic is searched, the entire catalog including all of the external references is searched providing the most comprehensive results available.

The main screen of the Wintility application from PX Technologies. (Click for high-resolution image.)

The catalogs created in Wintility can be shared by users within a workgroup irrespective of where the documents are located. This approach makes it possible for one or all members of a team to create catalogs for searches. With the catalog's created, they can now be searched against criteria. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Wintility at this point is that it searches the catalogs afresh each time, thereby catching any changes that have been made to files since the last search. This ensures that the results delivered by the search are always as accurate as possible.