OneDrive - Tags / Labels

Copper Contributor

One of our folks has asked if OneDrive can be used to tag (label) documents (similar to Dropbox) and then searched by the document creator and/or folks the files have been granted access to the files.  Word and Excel provide the option to add tags under the "more options" dialogue, but that is searchable only on the local computer.  It seems that information isn't sychronized to the cloud.  Beyond this, so far I'm coming up empty-handed.  

 

Can this be done with another solution or perhaps with a OneDrive option that I'm missing?  

11 Replies
AFAIK, ODFB does not provide this tags support...what you have when working with SPO Doc Libraries is the ability to add metadata to your documents and you can use later this metadata in SPO search

As @Juan Carlos González Martín said, adding metadata in ODfB is in practice not supported anymore.

The logic behind this behavior appears to be that, since ODfB is for personal files, metadata are not much useful.

If you find that other people routinely need to use metadata for searching in some user's ODfB files shared with them, maybe you should consider using an SPO library instead.

While not exactly what you are asking about, you can create Labels in the O365 Security and Compliance center that can be used for a variety of purposes, see https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Overview-of-labels-af398293-c69d-465e-a249-d74561552d30 for the details.

 

Another option is to use Azure Information Protection to provide users the ability to classify and label documents. This will provide your organization the ability to control the use of files when they are shared or removed from the system, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/information-protection/understand-explore/what-is-information-prote... for some more info.

 

MS is currently working on consolidating/integrating these 2 labeling techniques.

 

Custom search pages can be created to make it easy to find files that have these types of labels 

Thanks Nicholas!

Thanks Dean!

Thanks Salvatore! I looked into an SPO library, as well as Microsoft Teams. Both are missing metadata.
Thanks Juan!

@Joe Gilland

Metadata are a fundamental part of SharePoint.

For starters, give a look to this article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-column-in-a-SharePoint-list-or-library-2b0361ae-1b...

Juan, 

 

Creating Metadata works within OneDrive for Business Library too?

It should!