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

Metadata – Why?

#spthingaday 008 – Information Architecture. Metadata – Why? #SharePoint, #Office365.. 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. #microsoft #microsoftoffice #microsoftsharepoint #microsofttraining #officetraining #freetraining #trainingvideos #contentmanagement #enterprisecontentmanagement

A post shared by JFDI Consulting #spthingaday (@jfdiconsulting) on Dec 7, 2017 at 10:56pm PST

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.