After years of hearing about it, we’ve learned that we at least aught to be open to using metadata, even if we’re not too clear about what it is or where it fits in with our day-to-day work life.

At the show, a number of new and upgraded products are making us think we better get with the program.

GridIron Software’s GridIron Flow offers a pretty slick solution. Due to hit public beta in a few months, it still managed to win a Best of Show at Macworld 2008. It’s digital content management software for those working on graphic design, web, and video projects. The software (Mac and PC) tracks the design process by creating a graphic image file to represent the relationship between the software on a computer and the files that software creates.

(GridIron Software is more known for its Nucleo Pro software, now in Version 2, which enables speedy Adobe After Effects rendering by employing a grid computing network.)

Adobe’s Version Cue is one example of a software product that attempts to create an easily revisable history to allow you to inspect and change past actions, say the creation of a Photoshop’d image, although the product’s actual usefulness hasn’t been born out by wide use or acceptance, at least according to a few blog postings I’ve come across.

GridIron Flow will pull together all of the apps you’ve used to create a specific edit, opening up in one step all the various programs and files you’ve used to create whatever it is you’ve asked it to track. While not metadata per se, the software’s ability to wrangle versioning and pipeline tracking is a key benefit to putting data about data to work.

GridIron Software CEO Steve Forde says it’s an easy way for creatives to “visualize their design process and share their projects with a colleague, ship them to a client or archive them for safe keeping.”

The price point, just now available at the show, is $349. Find out more at www.gridironsoftware.com.

Instead of touting a hodge-podge of third party products and applications as in past shows, this year’s Microsoft booth is focused on two main areas: Silverlight (a browser plug-in that allows building of rich web apps that include animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback) and Microsoft Interactive Media Manager, a collaborative media management approach that’s not so much a specific product but a series of “solutions” built upon Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The idea here is to create an end-to-end content production system simple enough to use so that it’s accessible by everyone in your business. Launched around last year’s show, Version 2.0 was in the booth, with a final release sked’d for July.

In a blog, UK-based Microsoft Media Architect Andrew Gayter described it a “a monumental jump forward on previous attempts for Microsoft to get into the media space” since it’s been designed to work with TV broadcasters from “ingest to playout” with reputable types like Telestream and Avid involved.

In the demo I saw of Interactive Media Manager (IMM), video files that had been transcoded to MXF and stored on a central server were rapidly ingested into a database that offered a “Lego blocks” (the demo guy’s term) approach that allowed quick building of a viewer and note-taking interface. Playing back the video, you could stop at specific spots, make notes that were tied to timecode, send e-mails about the desired changes in the integrated mail app, and so on.

IMM integrates with Microsoft business intelligence tools, all meant to offer ways to track content creation and management as well as to deliver the results to end-users.

At the show, Microsoft announced a strategic alliance with Ascent Media Group for “automating and streamlining the supply chain for the media and entertainment industry” and help them transition to the digital age.

Pretty grand talk, but as part of the alliance, Microsoft will work with a variety of partners to create “new solutions” that Ascent Media Group will use to manage its business processes as well as offer as services to media and entertainment companies.