Forum Discussion
Metadata vs Folders
The answer is both! Folders are connected to channels in Teams - and they really aren't evil! They do help organize content and if you want to work with content offline, you often don't want to sync an entire library - so having folders really helps. The challenges I find with folder are when you have multiple levels of nested folders. That's where metadata often provides a much better organizing framework. Metadata is far from dead - in fact, it's just as important as ever - but for many simple collaboration scenarios, folders are a good way to organize information. So, it's not either/or - it's both, as long as you try to limit to 1-2 levels of folders. There may be some use cases for more levels, but it makes information discovery much more complicated so it's not a great approach from an information architecture perspective. That's where metadata can really help, especially when content really "belongs" in two contexts. One of my favorite announcements is that very soon, you will be able to see and interact with metadata in the context of Teams - bringing the rich metadata you get in SharePoint everywhere you interact with a file. I think that investment shows that metadata is still really important!
Using metadata and enforcing it in collaboration context where multiple users are working on different files and possibly "dumping" large amount of files, I don't think it can work out.
When it comes to folders, I think the guidance should be to limit nesting, keep name short and relevant (same for file names).
Overall I think you want your users to put their files into SharePoint, highly organized or not. After the search could always help with finding stuff... I think search will only improve with time backed with more AI.
We use OneDrive as the users personal drive and they determine the folder structure as this is not a collab area. When Teams gets the SharePoint experience that will be great! As that will help with collab. I'm surprised to hear voices say, do not use metadata for collab context or large file repositories. That was the one area I was focused on. I wish Microsoft would clarify their stance, since there is no way to prevent users from creating folders 8 layers deep. It's not realistic to say only create 1 or 2 folder levels. Users like to hide their data in folders and when they leave the company the new person creates their own folder structure. My understanding was metadata did away with all of this...But Microsoft has gone somewhat quiet...
- My view on this is that the metadata trend comes from old classic SharePoint on-premises.
Things are different nowadays, in Teams they create one folder per channel in the default document library and the natural way would be to create more folders under that, and not adding columns.
Metadata can still be used when it's appropriate, but I don't think we can say it's a realistic for day to day files repository.
But I guess there will be always some debate around this.
