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SharePoint Thing a Day – 008 – Information Architecture. Metadata – Why?

December 8, 2017 by Joel Jeffery

Metadata – Why?

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by JFDI Consulting #spthingaday (@jfdiconsulting)

I was recently asked if I could come up with a scenario where metadata would be better than folders.

Here goes!

Imagine I have scans of receipts as PDFs, and I want to store them per vendor, per department and per year.
I could create a document library. At the root let’s put one folder for each vendor. Inside those, a folder for each department. Inside those, one folder per year.
My users can upload their receipts into the correct year folder, using the browser; Windows Explorer; OneDrive Sync – or Outlook plugins like OnePlace, Harmonie, Repstor etc.

Users can now view all the receipts for a particular vendor, and drill in to get the detail.

But, if a user wants a view of these receipts by department or by year,
we would have to entirely restructure the document library – and move files around in bulk.

Alternatively, we could use metadata.
Let’s create a Content Type for Scanned Receipts that has Site Columns for Department, Vendor and Year.

Just by doing that, users can have views showing: receipts per department, receipts per year, receipts per vendor and any combination of these.

If you care about your files: USE METADATA.

Filed Under: SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, Training Tagged With: Office 365, SharePoint, SharePoint Online, SharePoint Videos, SPThingADay

Joel is a full-stack cloud architect who codes. He is a Microsoft Certified SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server and Azure specialist and Microsoft Certified Trainer.
He has over 20 years' experience with SharePoint and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
He's also co-founder of Microsoft Gold Partner JFDI Consulting Ltd. Read More…

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