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michael reinhart

Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.
Plague: Folders in SharePoint Document Libraries?
I'd love to hear what others have to say, but I really dislike the use of folders in SharePoint document libraries.  They cause a disconnect which prevents the effective use of custom views to “mine” information.  My motto?--- let the Metadata help you to organize the documents, rather than rigid storage hierarchies.  Often when a SharePoint newbie sits down in front of a Document Library for the first time, they begin creating folders like they did in the file system, and I cringe.  Also, as a frequent consumer of the contents of document libraries, I don't want to have to figure out how to navigate a folder hierarchy to find a file-- I'd much rather use search, filters, and custom views to find relevant stuff.
 
For example, a really smart colleague created a folder called "PMO Minutes and Agendas" in a document library… my response was to suggest that we:
 
a) keep the documents in ONE place
b) create 2 custom columns: Department (which would contain PMO as a choice), and Document Type (which would contain Minutes and Agendas as a choice)
 
The beauty of this approach is that I can create custom views like "PMO Minutes and Agendas", or "Minutes and Agendas", or "PMO" to slice and dice the contents of the library… I can even simulate a folder hierarchy by using grouping on these columns.  If we have stuff in folders, it doesn't work that way.
 
Also, I can use one of my favorite tricks… when I'm emailing someone and talking about a set of documents or one specific document, I do this:
 
1) in the document library, click the Filter button in the toolbar
 
2) set up column filters so that the document(s) you're interested in are displayed-- you have to click the "Change Filter" button each time you need to add another filter
 
3) copy the URL from the address field of your browser
 
4) paste the URL into your email message… it will look something like this:
 
In my email message I could say something like: "Check out these 2 documents that Libardo wrote on Project Governance: http://project2/sites/SCON/2005%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?FilterField1=Document%5fx0020%5fType&FilterValue1=Project%20Governance&SortField=Document%5fx0020%5fType&SortDir=Asc&View=%7b1D47906E%2d8F8F%2d45CA%2d8A83%2d02B549A331E5%7d&FilterField2=Editor&FilterValue2=Libardo%20Salcedo
 
Admittedly, it's extremely ugly, but it takes the user precisely to a filtered view of a document library that could contain a ton of documents…
 
Maybe I'm missing something obvious?
 
m
Posted: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 10:50 AM by reinhart
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Comments

Anonymous said:

Michael, you are 100% correct! I actually created a column titled "Folder" in my DocLibrary template. It is inevitable that a user will put the DocLibrary on a WebPart page and then call me wondering where the missing documents are.
# April 13, 2005 2:24 PM

Anonymous said:

I agree 100%. Folders used incorrectly (which is what most people do) are terrible.

The problems come when MS suggest the SharePoint products as a modern way of storing data at present stored in the file system. So "logically" these new users shove all their data into folders (usually) within Shared Documents (which for some is the only Document Library that is shared !)

Add to that the fact that the folders implementation has obviously not been designed for this (use as you say Views) but for things like index.htm referring to fields in a lower level directory and you get all these problems.
# April 14, 2005 12:26 AM

Anonymous said:

Alternat way of providing a shorter url
http://www.wssdemo.com/redir.aspx?url=36

Just need to create a right click option in IE to send the current page URL to a SharePoint hosted page that creates a list item for the long url and copies the redirection page url to the clipboard for you to paste into an email.
# April 14, 2005 7:40 PM

Anonymous said:

However, you CAN create views that ignore the folders, so if you want to have both folders with and without views, you have that option...metadata, however, must be maintained regardless!!
# June 8, 2005 2:41 PM

Anonymous said:

I agree but I also see another problem. What if a user decides he or shre wants to copy the data from SharePoint onto thier My Documents folder or on to a CD so they can send to a customer or client. All the files are just in one folder and it looks a mess.

Anybody else had this?

jonathan_kettle@hotmail.com
# June 25, 2005 6:46 AM

Anonymous said:

Michael,

I posted this to another blog w/ a similar topic... I wanted to get your take on it as well.

Do you see folders as a necessity when storing large quantities of documents? Let's say you have 10,000 documents of the same type and with the same metadata that you want to store in a library. Isn't this a scenario where you would justify folders given the 2000 files per level suggestion by Msft? I'm currently working on a process that pushes files to SharePoint. Instead of a creating multiple document libraries with the same metadata structure, I'm leveraging folders to ensure that we do not violate the 2000 documents/level suggestion.

Thoughts?
Erik
# July 9, 2005 7:34 AM

reinhart said:

See my new post on this...
# July 10, 2005 8:01 AM

Anonymous said:

Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Didn't you know?
# November 24, 2005 7:14 AM

Anonymous said:

I don't think so a user can copy date of his interest from sharepoint this easily.
# December 14, 2005 4:15 AM

Anonymous said:

Nice information! i hope next time when i'm using folders in sharepoint document it would really help me.
# April 12, 2006 12:47 PM

Anonymous said:

Great Post. Im just wondeirng we our currently looking into a move of our current document mangament system to wss. However, our current system has some 16,000 companies on it. And for each company we could have 100+ documents. Surely in terms of performance alone we would require some sort of folder structure to at least make the system usuable?

# July 6, 2006 7:52 AM

Anonymous said:

Michael Reinhart where is your other post that you are referring to above? I have a document library that has over 18k documents in it and need to figure out how to make it load faster. Currently the documents are all just in the DL and are grouped with metadata, but this causes the library to load extremely slow. I was thinking about putting the documents in folder and just creating a no folders view and still grouping the documents by the metadata. Is this what you recommend? Will it really help that much?
# August 23, 2006 9:36 AM

reinhart said:

Kevin:

IMO, your default view should be grouped by the column that you create such as the "Folder" column that Paul suggests in the first comment here... 100+ documents is not really that many.

S. Baker:

Yikes... 18,000 is a lot of documents for a SharePoint library (IMO). I know that the technical documentation says you can have some insane amount more than that, but I've never thought that SharePoint (v 2003 or earlier) was really meant for that... Your approach to use a No Folders view would likely not speed things up... perhaps paging?

Michael
# August 30, 2006 6:36 PM

reinhart said:

S. Baker... my other post is at http://blogs.officezealot.com/reinhart/archive/2005/07/10/6742.aspx

Cheers,
Michael
# August 30, 2006 5:45 PM

Anonymous said:

I would like to hear technical reasons and not personal frustration.
# October 4, 2006 9:16 AM

michael reinhart said:

In an earlier post , I lamented the use of folders in SharePoint document libraries as a way to organize

# January 2, 2007 2:50 PM

For The User said:

In SharePoint, metadata is good. Metadata is very good. "That's great," you say, "but

# November 1, 2007 8:37 AM

BobW said:

I think folders have a place in Sharepoint. They are a great and useful metaphor that has proven its worth worldwide for over 3 decades. Just because someone has invented an ingenious new platform for managing documents, doesn't necessarily mean all that went before has suddenly become hopelessly outmoded.

If documents can be tagged with metadata via columns, why not tag sharepoint document library folders with metadata, too? That would seem to give yet another dimension to storage schemes...a 'best of both worlds' capability.

However, I've been unsuccessful doing that: oddly, I can create a folder in a sharepoint 7 document library, and I can add a column, but the column is always read-only...there seems to be no way to put any data into it.  Is this the way it's supposed to (not) work, or am I missing something?

# December 16, 2008 3:21 PM

Metadata and filters vs. folders « Michiel’s SharePoint Blog said:

PingBack from http://michielsharepointblog.com/2009/03/14/metadata-and-filters-vs-folders/

# March 14, 2009 6:36 AM

Metadata and filters vs. folders « Michiel's ECM Blog said:

PingBack from http://michielsecmblog.com/2009/03/14/metadata-and-filters-vs-folders/

# December 22, 2009 4:27 AM

Pirogue said:

Folders are important in some aspects of document libraries. And here is why I use them: I use folders to give my documents different sets of permissions. I have a bunch of documents - I use columns to give the documents metadata and I use folders to give them different permissions. If I have documents that only senior leaders have access to, I drop them in one folder, manager access gets its own folder, and so forth. So I don't use folders to organize (that is what the metadata and views are for), but I use it to help me manage my permissions/access to the documents. Assigning access for each document is possible, but it takes more time and is less managable, especially if certain documents are associated with several different groups.

If you have a document library that all should see, then it makes less sense, but for me, folders are invaluable.

# September 22, 2010 10:00 PM
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