Forum Discussion
Tagging in SharePoint Online
Bsteenson I'm not privy to Microsoft's actual reasoning for the change, but my experience with required metadata was awful. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE metadata. Nothing gives me more anxiety at work than looking at a file structure that's 10 levels deep and being expected to find a specific document. But metadata requires a level of discipline that most people don't want to bother with so they ignore it - which is pretty easy to do even back in classic days when the metadata fields were truly required. And ignoring the required metadata created WAY more problems. I'm kinda glad they've moved away from that.
Let's also acknowledge that SharePoint is not an enterprise content management system. If you're trying to do that, it's like putting in a screw with a hammer. I mean, you CAN but it's a miserable experience. We use SAP for documents that require true enterprise content management. As a result, most of us avoid it like the plague cuz it's a PITA. SharePoint is a tool for sharing content with others and getting work done. It's pretty good at that.
For me, the real issue of metadata vs folders is content retrieval - how do I quickly and easily find content without drilling through a ton of folders only to find the document isn't there or has been misfiled.
I have switched to search. I let people do their folders the way they want to and when I need a document, I use search. It's easier and requires much less discipline than metadata.
You used to be able to require metadata on documents-but that actually resulted in a lot of issues- like thousands of “invisible” documents because they ended up in a checked out state available only to the person who uploaded them. You can still have required metadata, but if you don’t add it, your documents are still uploaded and available to everyone. And you now have an automatic view showing files missing metadata.
If metadata is critical to a work process, you have options to make “tagging” less painful for users:
- Add a Power Automate flow to remind the uploader to add metadata
- Use document sets to automatically assign metadata in relevant use cases like proposals or contracts
- Use column default values in folders (and add views without folders)
- Consider Microsoft Syntex for automatically assigning metadata in key scenarios
As an information architect, I love metadata, but the reality is that people often ask users to add way more metadata than is actually necessary. As a result, users hate it. Instead, focus on what is important for your business outcomes and teach users how to name their files to improve search and search query techniques to find files with search. And, don’t ban folders-they are a form of metadata. It’s deep levels of nested folders that cause usability and findability issues.