Ask Paul

Fellow entrepreneur (and one of my college buddies) Paul Allen just released a pretty cool tool called Ask Paul. Ask Paul allows a user to search all public shared folders that a computer is a part of. This is great for people with home networks like myself who keep a ton of stuff on a shared drive between laptop and desktop.

It's even better for people in a corporate environment who are connected to massive shared drives and can never seem to find anything. I know I sure could have used it back when I was in industry - I can't tell you how much time I wasted browsing through network drives to find what I was looking for.

The interface has the look and feel of a Google application so it's pretty easy to pick up. Installation takes less than 15 minutes if you follow the instructions provided. For those concerned about security, no information is sent back to any server, the application simply follows all of the possible paths for shared network folders and records file names and locations in a local text file.

If you use shared network folders at all, there's no reason not to give this a shot. The 15 minutes you spend installing it will be paid back to you hundreds of times over in the time saved looking through folders.