Outlook only has one user, so that simplifies things. If there were rules for fields in Laserfiche, would you expect them to be repository-wide, per user, per folder or a combination of that?

You see how this sort of spins out of control fast. But we're open to suggestions and this is where more use cases really help.

Yes, I certainly see that!

I would think they would apply repository wide if you went with the "use this field for color instead of templates" option. 

But that got me thinking - what if we could say "use this field to determine color per Template". I'd say 90% of my installations never use more than one template per folder because everything in said folder might be an HR document. That's why I don't really use color much. We are trying to design systems that can be greatly expanded and having 10 templates a department can cause usability issues if you add in 10 other departments with people that need to see more than one department. (incidentally, this is the reason I think dynamically hiding/showing fields on a template would be a fantastic idea!)

So as a suggestion, how about having a color tied to a list field? You could optionally map a color to each option in that list field that would be tied to the color of the document.

And really, my main use case for this is to color code things that are "urgent", "fast","relatively soon", "whenever". I'm thinking things like order entry. We want to get on it right away if it's an order over a certain dollar amount or from a special client.

If I had the option of changing the colors based on a list field within the template used then I suspect I'd use it all the time making the system more friendly.  Using Invoices as an example I would generally use the same invoice template for every invoice but if I had a "status" field that changed the documents color I could now change documents to green if paid, to yellow if invoice sent, or to red if the invoice is overdue. I'm sure just thinking a minute or two you could think of other departments that would benefit from this too. So if you clicked into a customer's invoices folder you might have an array of shortcuts to link to invoices but at a glance you know which ones haven't been paid yet. Yes, you could look for "paid" in a field column but colors would make that data more stand out more, just like it does when you are looking at a spreadsheet. 

Right now I sometimes do this for clients by creating a "processing" folder with a subfolder under that marked urgent. I put shortcuts or the document in that folder if there is urgent issues waiting. I then run a workflow on a timer ever couple of minutes to see the count of that folder - if it's over 0 I put a template on it that turns the folder red, if it's 0 I remove the template or put one on that shows green. But this workaround is clunky and not instantaneous, plus it rarely updates the colors on the folder list on the left of the desktop client. (that's why I put it as a subfolder in whatever folder they constantly look at so it's more visible when it's red!)