Applying Metadata automatically to all files in a folder
Metadata can be incredibly useful for organizing files within a document library. However the process for filling out the metadata on individual documents can often be time-consuming even using things such as the data-view to apply the metadata to a large number of files. Not to mention the process of checking in and approving those files if those features are enabled. I've actually been asked a number of times if there was a way to apply metadata tags to a file based on the folder it is uploaded into. This is not possible out of the box, however with a simple event handler this can be enabled. Mark Gerow from law.com recently published an article that describes enabling this functionality for a law firm here:
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202424667503 . The nice thing about this solution is that although the event handler is custom it allows the site administrators to configure it through the out of the box interface for SharePoint by adding additional folder content types.