Folders: If You Can't Kill Them, Hide Them

Professional
SharePoint 2010
Development

Pity the lowly folder. SharePoint document library folders are not feeling the love from all sides. The common argument is that they promote unorganized document management, make filtering difficult, hide content, provide a rigid hierarchy, and don’t take advantage of SharePoint’s strong and flexible metadata capabilities.

Folders are horrible, horrible little beasts.

And you know what? The general consensus is absolutely correct. Folders are horrible, horrible little beasts.

However, they do have their uses:

The most obvious, people like them. They are comfortable with them, and they like storing their documents into little buckets as defined by them.
Custom permissions can be assigned, by the user, at the folder level thereby providing custom permissions to all child documents and folders. In certain circumstances it may be beneficial to restrict a subset of a document library from certain users or groups.
In a large document library, folders can be used to help limit the number of documents returned from the database for a view. Microsoft recommends not having a library (or view/folder) with more than 2000 documents for performance reasons.

Now, like I said, I’m all for the proper architecting of a SharePoint document management solution utilizing Content Types and views. However, even if the metadata has been properly defined, and the Libraries properly setup, some users will still want the ability to create folders.

So what do you do?

Have both. As they say, let them have their cake and eat it too. Allow them to create their folders, but also create views that filter the documents based on content types or custom columns. The simple trick is to hide the folders for those metadata views:

I often create a "No Folders" public view on those folder-heavy, zero meta-data libraries. That way I can easily see just the documents without those pesky folders getting in the way.

Some possible links for second sentence: “…from all sides…”

This is a guest post brought to you by Pete Robinson, a Toronto based SharePoint Consultant.

Posted on 4-Jun-09 by SharePointBuzz
3 Comments | Trackback Url | Link to this post | Bookmark this post with:

Tags: Web Content Management, Taxonomy, How To, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Friday, 5 Jun 2009 09:55 by Richard Harbridge

Good post. :) Folders certainly have important uses in SharePoint and in the document management world. Many user requirements don't really facilitate the need for intensive/extensive or even any metadata yet because the business processes and business knowledge of what that metadata could be just isn't there. Especially if we consider the proper use of content types and libraries (if the library has one content type all document content would automatically be associated with that content type (or the default one) which 'categorizes' and already starts on the metadata path.) Looking forward to future posts.

Thursday, 18 Jun 2009 02:24 by Adam Stotts

I agree that it is better to use site columns instead of folders to categorize documents, but I found one other reason folders may be preferred by users: uploading multiple documents. When you upload a single document, you are prompted for metadata and must select values for required properties. But if you upload multiple docs, you skip the metadata form and required fields are assigned no values! Granted, it does force you to provide required properties before you can check in, but that’s tedious work for uploading multiple docs.

Thursday, 18 Jun 2009 07:38 by Kanwal Khipple

re: uploading multiple documents, you can always define defaults for metadata associated to different buckets of documents. It's a longer process but simplify some of the metadata information.

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