Most financial advi–sors work in an environment overflowing with computerized information. More information may mean you’re more efficient and informed. But a data-intensive environment creates its own problems.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in dealing with all the incoming data is knowing where to put the information so you can find it later. But there are solutions — whether you download a file from the Web, receive it by e-mail or create it yourself. When you need to retrieve it later on, you can look to search capabilities such as that which Microsoft Corp. has built into its new Vista operating system or that Google Inc. offers with its third-party applications.

Some people are intensive filers, building an arcane structure of folders and subfolders in which to store everything. Others tend to be dumpers, creating a single folder and piling everything into it, in the hope that they will be able to find it all later. The first of these approaches can bury documents in obscure locations. The latter creates an unmanageable mass of files, especially if you can’t remember what you called a file containing a particular piece of content.

Part of the problem is that while the personal computer has evolved considerably over the past 25 years, the file structure it uses has stayed relatively static. PCs have always used directories, which can be nested inside one another, just as physical folders can be put in drawers.

In the 1990s, Microsoft dreamed of moving to a different file system. Under it, the folder structure would have remained, but files would have been linked to one another in other ways. For example, you may have taken a photograph at a conference. That photograph may have been difficult to find six months later, but if you remembered you took it at the conference, you could have found the conference in your event calendar, clicked on it and retrieved files created at that time.

This file system didn’t materialize, but Microsoft and others have nevertheless made great strides in making files easier to find. Desktop searching has become an increasingly important part of the user experience — so much so that Microsoft built Windows Vista around it. Its desktop search engine is embedded in the system and indexes files as they are saved to the computer.

Typing in your search term within the Vista start menu brings up any documents or e-mails containing your search term.

Google also provides a desktop search system, downloadable as a free third-party application, that does much the same thing.

This isn’t the only way that Microsoft tries to improve searchability in Vista. “We now give people the ability to add tags to documents,” says Elizabeth Caley, group manager for office servers at Microsoft Canada in Mississauga, Ont. “This lets you very quickly filter, sort or find information without actually changing the title of the document or knowing where it’s stored on the machine.”

You might quickly assign the tag “follow-up” to a file, and then not have to worry about where you put it. Using that tag when searching would quickly show you all the documents you have to deal with that week.

But tagging and desktop search won’t be much help if the information is somewhere on the network rather than on your own computer. In addition to its desktop product, Google — for a price — offers hardware devices, or appliances, designed to search for documents on a central intranet server.

“There are three circles we think of at Google,” says Nitin Mangtani, lead project manager at Google in Mountain View, Calif. “They are: ‘my information,’ ‘our information’ and ‘the information out there in the world’.” These equate to the desktop, the office and the Internet, respectively.

For financial advisors who operate as small businesses, the Google Mini appliance is the most suitable; it starts at US$2,000 for a version that indexes 50,000 documents.

Thunderstone, based in Cleve-land, also offers enterprise search appliances to small businesses. CEO John Turnbull suggests advisors check the flexibility of the search parameters.

“With our device, you can do explicit proximity searches, finding two words within five words of each other, or in the same paragraph or sentence,” he says. “You can tune whether proximity is very important or mildly important.”

@page_break@Search appliances generally target documents on one or more file servers, but the challenge for many firms will lie in searching across multiple desktops. In many organizations, information relevant to the whole department may languish on one individual’s hard drive. How do you incorporate that into an enterprise search?

Mangtani suggests “mapping” individual desktop drives to a network server, so files are automatically saved to a central location. The other option, says Turnbull, is to make desktop drives available as network shares, so others can connect to them and include them in a search.

Shared access, however, raises security issues. Some firms, especially in regulated sectors such as financial services, may not want all employees to access all files. One option is to use existing system privileges. For example, Google Mini can integrate with a lightweight directory access protocol directory system such as Microsoft’s Active Directory. The appliance queries the directory to validate and authorize the user, and displays only documents the user has access to when rendering search results.

The advantage of running an enterprise search system via an appliance is you can treat it as a black box, forgetting about it once you have plugged it into the network and set it up.

The type of system you choose will depend on how much the individuals in your group need to share documents. Many advisors manage their own books, so a desktop search may be sufficient. But if the company builds information it needs to share, enterprise search may be the way to go.

Whichever you choose, rest assured that those elusive documents won’t stay hidden long. IE