Folders and Metadata

This afternoon we started having a discussion on Twitter about metadata and folder structures within a document library. 140 characters was too few for me to really get into the nitty gritty so I’ll expound a bit.

I detest folders in libraries, although I have implemented a few folder based libraries because item level security required it. The only other time I’d consider folders is libraries where you start running into that 2000 item per view limit.

That being said, I had a user today need help organizing a library to show subfolders in the appropriate month order. To detail further, we have an environment where site collections are provisioned as desired and I serve in a capacity to oversee that process and consult and train owners of the site collections as needed. This was a case where I knew the right method, metadata and grouped/sorted views, was going to be the wrong path to take. I chose the work around to rename the folders so that it would sort properly instead of reworking their entire library.

Sometimes you have to choose your battles, after assessing the situation, I opted for the “wrong way”. If this was one of my power users, I’d definitely have pushed to the best practice method.

This is one of those great debate topics in Sharepoint and once you get it, you’re like “wow”. It really is an eye opener in administration when you make that synapse connection.

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