Working with multiple documents in SharePoint

You can group the documents using view settings.  Then you can use actions > edit in datasheet view to update the fields more quickly (rather then clicking the edit drop down of each item to edit the properties).  
To upload the documents you can either click "upload multiple documents" or you can do a drag and drop by using actions > open with windows explorer

Melli111;

Thanks for your input, but this customer is very difficult, and because of the sheer volumes of documents residing on shared drives(NOVELL Shares) they would prefer not to have to do any editing that would entail them having to edit the metadata of each individual doc. In addition, most of the users here DO NOT have microsoft office. The documents(think files) may also be zip and iso files....in which case colums would have to be used as metadata.

I'm even willing to use a third party solution if one exists...

Thoughts?

Would the metadata be consistent for many of the documents (such as the groups they put them in would all have the same metadata).  If so they could just enter it once and fill down the rest in the datasheet view edit screen.  As far as the zip files and stuff goes... eeee, I'm not too sure on a solution there.  I know it comes up a lot with people wanting to get everything off share drives and into Sharepoint.  I haven't crossed that path yet, but will be in the future so I haven't spent much time on finding the best solution.
I'm not aware of any third party addons for this out there... but I tend to shy away from third party addons other than backup/restore utilities (things like that).  I would think someone out there has something for this, but none that I know of.  
I can't really picture the scenario where they wouldn't have to manually add metadata... unless they want to pull that metadata from elsewhere (a database) and link it with the files.

Melli111;

Yes the metadata would be consistent for say about 15 documents, and they would be placed in one folder in the document library, then another set of documents might have different metadata and so on....

Here are two quick and easy ways to batch change metadata faster:

 a) use the "Edit in datasheet" view, set the value in one cell, and drag the cell to other cells exactly the same way you can do this in Excel. This will copy the same value to multiple cells. Before doing so, make sure all the fields you want to set  are present in the current view.

b) before uploading a set of documents that share the same metadata, change the default values for these metadata so that it matches the desired value. Next, import the documents using multiple upload, or copy/paste through the Explorer view. Next, change the default metadata values for the next set of documents you want to import.

This method worked best.