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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...
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!
Look at Column Default Value settings in library settings. That feature has been around for a long time and automatically applies metadata when content is uploaded to a folder. It is not a perfect solution but it can help. You need a view with folders for uploading and a view without for display. I usually show a before and after metadata scenario to show how many “questions you can answer/discover” about your content with metadata vs. folders. But I think this is most helpful for intranet/communication sites. For team collaboration, I think the most important thing is that the team understands how they are organizing content. Search finds content in folders or not - but assumes you know what you are looking for. Metadata is great for discovery - when you don’t know what you don’t know and don’t have time to dig through folders.
Hmmmmm. Thank you Susan and Christopher gives me something to think about and digest now. We have had lots of talks on our team around the folder vs metadata thing. We really like the metadata but the users like their folders. I like a hybrid approach so both of us are happy. I knew about the default values but that only goes so far. I do like the modern libraries better for folder use since you can have it apply metadata when dragging and dropping onto the folder automatically - real slick.
Now to digest this conversation and keep bugging MS for when they are going to allow us to actually allow a way to use search to query inside a folder in OneDrive.....:)
Thanks again.
One other thing to consider speaking on OneDrive. You cannot use metadata with the OneDrive client so if offline capability is a requirement you’re sort of forced into folders for metadata.Oh that is a good one will have to remember that. Well it is hard to use Metadata there for the normal user anyways, so folders are what is there and they use for the most part. Just wish you could do foldername:searchquery while in OneDrive. That would make a lot of my users very happy.
