I’d like to share with users of EagleFiler my practical experience of how useful EagleFiler may become in a professional workflow. This is because --as a Yojimbo and Devonthink user-- I was looking for a tool to integrate in my professional projects, and neither Yojimbo nor Devonthink were exactly what I wanted or needed --don’t get me wrong: both are excellent and I have a lot of information in those programs, so to have a quick importing way as EagleFiler does was very interesting.
I have to deal with tons of information at work: emails, webfiles, pdfs, Office docs, images, spreadsheets, movies, presentations, etc., but at the same time all this variety must be attached to and controlled by projects --what can be really challenging. Here is where EagleFiler really shines. In short words:
a) I prepare a yearly critical-path in ProjectWizards Merlin. Here I establish projects and the needed concepts or “sub-projects”.
b) Those projects become EagleFiler databases, and the “concepts” become subdirectories, and the categories “tags”, which in turn can hold whatever imported related mails, docs, and so on: always accessible to the rest of the programs, where I can easily attach notes, progress status, etc.
c) CTM FoxTrot Pro lets me find, without the necessity of opening the database, what I may need by project, tags and content: everything in context.
My point is that EagleFiler could be much, much more than an information collecting tool: it can become the core of professional project-oriented workflows at enterprise level (I work at the largest non profit organization in Mexico). EagleFiler assigns Open Metatags to the files: this can be utilized by other programs independently (Cocoatech’s PathFinder, for example --which I also use). If you try to organize the information on the Finder alone by folders or inaccessible formats, it’s so easy to lose the track. It would be great if it could have a collaborative-tracking system, but nevertheless, it has become of immense help for my projects. The EagleFiler approach is the best I’ve found for managing information: it does not do every thing, but it works very efficiently interconnected with other powerful applications.
I’ve seen in the past several favorable and unfavorable reviews here and there on the Web about EagleFiler --mainly comparing it to Yojimbo, DevonThink and others, which shine in other aspects–, but I think that many persons have still not noticed how powerful EagleFiler may be beyond occasional or personal use.