Video Transcript
Welcome. Today we're going deep on field-based metadata — what fields are, the difference between System Fields and Custom Fields, why fields matter to day-to-day work, and how the same field values show up consistently across many different Adept features. This session covers everything you need to understand fields as the backbone of Search, Data Cards, and reporting. Let's get started.
Metadata is information stored about a document, rather than the document content itself, and individual pieces of metadata are stored in fields. A document might have fields for Document Number, Description, Project, Status, and other information important to your organization — for example, a Document Number of 100123, a Description of 'Pump Assembly', and a Status of 'In'. Together, these field values describe the document and help distinguish it from every other document in the system. This is the everyday language people use when they talk about a document in Adept — they're really talking about its field values.
Not all fields are created the same way. Some fields are provided by Adept out of the box and are available in every system — these are called System Fields, and examples include Filename, Status, Adept Version, Library Name, and File Date. Other fields are created and configured by your own organization to support your specific business processes — these are Custom Fields, such as project codes, internal approval stages, or org-specific classifications. Here's the important part: regardless of how a field is defined, it can be used throughout Adept in exactly the same way — in Data Cards, Search, FileGuide, Grid Columns, reports, and more.
Fields help users find documents quickly, identify the correct document, filter and organize large document lists, understand a document's status and context, support document workflows and business processes, and use document information consistently throughout the system. The alternative really drives the point home: without fields, users would often need to open documents individually just to determine whether they contain the information they need — and that's slow and error-prone at any real scale. Fields are what let people work at the list level, scanning, filtering, and searching, instead of opening file after file.
The same metadata can appear in many places throughout Adept — different features simply present the information in different ways while all working from the same underlying field values. If you want to view or edit document information, you use a Data Card; for many documents at once, you use Grid Columns and Column Sets; to find documents using known values, you use Search; to browse by categories and attributes, you use FileGuide; and to review document details and related information together, you use the Document Dashboard. Although these features have very different purposes and layouts, a change made to a field value in one place is reflected wherever that field is displayed elsewhere.
Fields are one of the most commonly used types of document information in Adept, but they are not the only type. Adept also stores and uses full-text information extracted from document content, document relationships, historical versions of documents, metadata associated with those versions, audit records, and memo or supplemental information. A lot of this information — system metadata, properties, relationships, full-text content, and thumbnails — doesn't get entered by hand; it's populated automatically by a process called document extraction, which is covered in its own companion deck.
Let's bring it together. Fields describe a document rather than its content — things like Document Number, Description, Project, and Status — and System Fields and Custom Fields behave identically once defined, whether Adept provided them or your organization configured them. Critically, it's one set of values shown in many places: Data Cards, Grid Columns, Search, FileGuide, and the Document Dashboard all draw on the same field values, so a change in one place is reflected everywhere. Thanks for joining — feel free to explore the full documentation at cloud-docs.synergissoftware.com.
