Forum Discussion
Eat My Cake? SharePoint Search Folders
- For what you are describing, you may just be able to use "regular" folders. You can propagate metadata using Column default value settings so that solves (1) and for (2), the answer is yes. You can use Content Types if each document has different properties or just add a column called Document Type if they all share the same properties (i.e. Client Name). When you create a folder for each Client Name, set a default in Library settings. This seems a lot simpler than using document sets. I would consider document sets if I have a library of JUST proposals so I can keep all the files associated with a proposal together and have a standard "set up" for each proposal set. But, for what you are describing, I would first try using a Folder per client AND a Site Column that you add to the library for Client Name.
Full Text Search is an amazing technology, no doubt, but it can be a very blunt instrument when it comes to managing potentially thousands or even millions of documents.
If SharePoint doesn't support metadata well, big companies will always see it as a toy for personal and small business use, which it most definitely is not, imho, nor do I believe do Microsoft see it that way.
When I search for emails in Outlook, I rarely, or at least only as a last result, use full text search. I always use metadata search first e.g. from:client.com attachment:yes date:>10/01/2021. The same, imho, should go for document management within SharePoint.
But ultimately, you may well be right. If SharePoint doesn't meet my business requirements, then I too will have to abandon SharePoint and go elsewhere. For now, I am still optimistic ... and potentially naïve!
You may want to look into SharePoint's property promotion/demotion mechanism. This basically allows you to set metadata in an Office file and upon uploading it is automatically captured into a SharePoint column. This works bi-directional: changing the metadata value in the SharePoint column also results in a change in the value stored within the document. There are several caveats:
- the names of the columns must match exactly
- download an Office file from one site and then uploading the same Office file to another site results in the metadata value from the original site ending up in the new site (promotion takes precedence).
- it only works for Office files (i.e. does not work for other commonly used formats like pdf, msg, zip, ...
- changing the properties in the Office file is tedious given that the document information panel was dropped several years ago.
The classic example is the Title property in Word.
About using email metadata in SharePoint. OOTB this is not possible but there are Outlook add-ins or SharePoint SPFx apps that address this. For example, there are apps that automatically extract email metadata upon uploading (https://www.slimapplications.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/EmailManagerExtractedEmailMetadata.png).
Paul