Forum Discussion
John Reeb
Sep 28, 2018Copper Contributor
Metadata vs Folders
Attending Microsoft Ignite 2018 which Rocks! But I noticed all presentations with SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive were using Folders and not metadata. No one spoke of metadata and constantly referred t...
- Sep 28, 2018
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!
Rich_Malpass
Oct 20, 2022Copper Contributor
Folders work best for the person that sets them up. When others come to look for something, it can be like walking through a maze. As you branch down and open and close folders, you can easily get lost. As a hybrid approach consider setting up and organizing by metadata and then creating “Group By” views for the old-timers on your team who like the branching-down folder like discovery. As for me, I can’t wait until Microsoft comes out with a Windows OS that uses metadata instead of folders! Thanks John Reeb