Windows 7 has this neat feature called Libraries. It aggregates together several real folders - perhaps two or three folders on your machine, or perhaps one on your machine and one elsewhere on the network. Within this "virtual folder" you can search, sort, and otherwise explore a large collection of files without having to worry about which real folder houses them. The usual examples given are your photos or your music, but I could also see it being handy for those "project folders" that every developer keeps on the working box, and the shared project folder that some (but not all) of the documents have been copied to. If you set up a Library that represents all those folders, you can read through the documentation without getting caught up in whether a particular file is on the project share, developer A's machine, or developer B's machine.

This blog post by Vinod Unny (a fellow RD) presents another cool use for Libraries - as a temporary creation to help you copy and paste from many different folders (perhaps all those individual developer ones) into another (perhaps that project share.) What a nice explanation!

Kate