Windows Explorer, or any other file manager for that matter, is all about storing, organizing and retrieving files — in a rather inefficient way in the case of Windows Explorer. In that respect, any online alternative should not only offer similar services, but also provide some much-needed improvements.

When looking for such an alternative, one should keep in mind that all files are not created equal. Some are small and many, others are big and few, yet others are big and many. Some can be parsed and indexed automatically, others cannot. Some are to be kept private, others are to be shared with the public. All in all, the following breakdown can be applied and different online services used for specific types of files:

Documents: Use mail attachment in Gmail and object attachment in Salesforce.com. For most of us, documents usually are original Microsoft Office files or PDF printouts. When received or sent as attachments to emails, they can be retrieved with a simple search through email archives. Gmail does not yet index the content of attached documents, but since it can view Microsoft Office documents as HTML, nothing should prevent the Gmail team to add this feature in the not-so-distant future. This approach should be used for documents that will likely never be read more than once and that will never be modified, which is the case for the vast majority of documents that transit through one’s email inbox. For the others, a better solution is to contextualize the document by attaching it to a relevant object in Salesforce.com. Such an object could be a Contact, and Account, an Opportunity, or any custom object created with Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition. The only shortcoming I know with this approach is the fact that Salesforce.com does not currently support versioning for files attached to objects. If this feature is not added in the near future, a good solution would consist in using Zoho Writer for versioning and linking the document from Salesforce.com instead of attaching it. That being said, for this solution to work properly, Salesforce.com should add a “Create Link” feature in the “Notes & Attachment” section next to “New Note” and “Attach File”.

Pictures: Use Flickr. This service originally developed by Ludicorp and recently acquired by Yahoo! is “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world”. The pro account priced at a very reasonable $24.95 a year allows one to download 2GB worth of file every month and does not enforce any limit on storage capacity. RAW files taken with my 8.2 megapixels Canon EOS 1D Mark II are about 8MB in size, so 2GB of bandwidth amounts to 250 pictures a month. A professional photographer might need 100 times that today, but for the rest of us, it should be plenty enough. Flickr has the very best user interface I have seen, mainly through the utterly smart use of picture tagging combined with a REST architectural style. The only problem I found so far is that it only supports files in the BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF formats, therefore requiring a preliminary conversion of RAW files. Let’s hope that the Flickr team fixes that in the future and creates some kind of enterprise account that would waive the monthly bandwidth limit.

Music and Movies: Just don’t do it! Because of copyright issues, these are the only files I keep on my personally managed computing devices. I store music and movie files on a private server connected to the Internet through an SDSL line but only accessible through a VPN connection. I carry about half of my music files on my iPod and the use of playlists on iTunes makes synchronization of music files a trivial exercise. I do not see the need to carry more than one or two movies with me just quite yet.

This pragmatic approach provides a best of all world solution that I find hard to match with any traditional file system, including the one Microsoft intended to incorporate into Longhorn. Gmail’s non-linear archiving of unstructured data nicely complements Salesforce.com’s management of relational data, while Flickr’s meta-data indexing provides a much-needed solution to the explosion of digital picture assets. What is missing at this point is some level of integration between all three, but I shall come back to this topic in later posts. Also, while a file manager only helps with storing, organizing and retrieving files, in the connected world we live in today, sharing and publishing should be addressed as well. In that respect, future posts will cover services such as Backpack, Rallypoint, Socialtext, Writeboard and Zoho Writer that are trying to solve the issue of online collaboration through file sharing and publishing.