Desktops, metadata and filing
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JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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SharePoint gets a lot of hate from people who don’t use it properly. To be sure, Microsoft has not made the job of learning how to use it easy — Microsoft’s design decisions across its platform are pretty weird, so we should not be surprised — but here is a basic rule of thumb:
In SharePoint you organise by metadata, not by folders.
Folders
Folders are very old economy. The folder metaphor is, literally, based on physical artefacts that can only be in one place at any time. If I put this item in the “Litigation” folder, I can’t also put it in the “Knowledge Management” folder.
Where the same unitary item deserves to be in both folders, I must therefore duplicate it. Where it is a “living thing” plotting its own miserable trajectory through the cosmos — a contract under negotiation, or a periodically updated legal template for example — then duplicating it is a bummer. It duplicates the manual task of updating all copies of the document as it changes, and that introduces the opportunity for human error. There may be miskeys. A document may be forgotten. Version control is a pain.
Also your preferred hierarchy can change, as personel change, or business priorities, or circumstaces. Changing your hierarchy means completely re-engineering your folder structure.
So: a folder structure assumes a single hierarchy and multiple copies of each item.
Metadata
Metadata looks at the world the other way up. It says, “let there be a single canonical item, and multiple hierarchies.” Metadata allows you to non-destructively add hierarchies as you please. The more metadata fields you have, the more possible hierarchies there are. Unused hierarchies are almost costless.