Folders Vs Tags

Both Folders and Tags have their own advantages and disadvantages. Folders help organizing messages in hierarchical order, which tags don't support. Multiple tags can be set for single message, which Folders don't support. We all know that Gmail is one who played a vital role in revolutionizing the concept of tags for organizing the data/messages. Many users liked this approach, and its famous among IT geeks and youngsters. In one of the recent surveys, it is found that about 25% of American users and 15% of world wide users are using this Tags based approach for organizing their mails and its users are increasing.

About 85% of the people in the world still uses folders way of traditional approach to organize their data/messages, which is one of the reasons for even Google to come up with folders way of approach in Google Docs. Majority of enterprise users are not geeks, so any enterprise web based application that is designed should provide due consideration for these users.

In my view, both Folders and Tags should coexist. Use folders, first, as a organizational mechanism. Folder names are unique across the system, items can only be in one folder. If the users want to attach additional "tags" to an item, they can do that without affecting it's folder hierarchy. We can also provide an option to choose Folders and/or Tags in the application, whether the user is novice or geek the application should provide their preferred approach of data/message organization instead of restricting them with only one.