How to ”Best Practice” a Document Library to management / keep record of several Project Documents

[thomasknebel]

I want to create a Document Library to store documents related to a (e.g.) project. That means that a number of 1-6 document(s) that are related to a project will share a number of the same ”meta data” like ”Project Reference”, ”Project Name”, ”Project Start Date”, ”Project Due Date”, … and some ”meta data” will be quite unique related to the documents added like ”Document Type”.

What I am looking for is a kind of a ”virtual meta data folder” with project related ”meta data” that are specified once and assigned to all the documents I will store under this project and I only have to add the unique related ”meta data” to a document added to a specific project related-”virtual meta data folder”.

I just don’t want to use folders to define a project structure but use ”meta data” instead only, but want to make sure all documents stored under a particular project share the same project related ”virtual meta data folder”-”meta data” being assigned automatically.

So, maybe I completely misunderstand the philosophy behind SharePoint, but if not, maybe anybody else have asked oneself how to ”best practice” such an approach?

Best regards,

Thomas :)

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@thomasknebel First thing, folders are not “evil!” It is totally fine to use them to organize your documents. What you want to avoid are nested folders - deep folder hierarchy that requires a lot of clicking to find content. That said, if you have one Library per project, you can use column default values in Library Settings to automatically assign consistent metadata to each document when it is uploaded. If the file already has values for the metadata, the column default will not override what is already there - so you need to be careful if you copy files from other projects to use on new projects. Another option is to use a Document Set for each project. A document set is a special type of folder for which you can also set default metadata values. The difference with a document set is that the values you specify for the document set WILL override anything that is already in the document. 

Bottom line is that folder can be your friend for assigning metadata and, you can create “no folder” views that show your documents in a flat structure - the benefits of folders for assigning metadata and a metadata view for exploring and discovering content. 

[#3]

@Susan Hanley, thank you very much for your reply and feedback. I am still an too unexperienced SharePoint user to understand the full scope of your reply, but I will try to learn more about what you explained. I can see from your profile that you are an independent consultant and co-author of three SharePoint books. Does one of your books explain in more detail what you described in your reply?

[#4]

Probably, but try this: to set a default value for a library or a folder, go to Library Settings and select Column default value settings. From there, you can set default values for the library or select a specific folder and then the column for which you want to specify a default. That will allow you to have a different default value for each folder.

There is a lot of information online about creating document sets in SharePoint. This is a relatively old post but the steps should still work: https://sharepointmaven.com/document-sets-hidden-gem-sharepoint/. Here is another good reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/document-sets-are-magic.

[#5]

@Susan Hanley, thank you very much for your support! I will read and learn the recommended information about document sets.