Forum Discussion
Metadata vs Folders
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!
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.
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.
