document management in sharepoint without folders - introduction to metadata

sharepointmaven.com @gregoryzelfond

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT IN SHAREPOINT WITHOUT FOLDERS

INTRODUCTION TO METADATASTEP BY STEP GUIDE

GREGORY ZELFOND

sharepointmaven.com @gregoryzelfondsharepointmaven.com @gregoryzelfond

About Me

Gregory Zelfond 10+ years of experience with SharePoint SharePoint advocate, blogger Love to solve business problems using code-free, out of

the box SharePoint configurations Owner of SharePoint Maven (sharepointmaven.com)

About SharePoint Maven

I HELP ORGANIZATIONS TO UNLOCK THE POWER OF SHAREPOINT

MIGRATION CONSULTING TRAINING

Super Easy…

A guide so easy to understand...

…You’ll feel like a king at the end

1. What’s wrong with Folders?

2. Intro to Metadata

3. Step-by-Step on how to setup SharePoint Metadata

This presentation will cover…

What’s wrong with Folders?

Real-life scenario

You are in an organization that runs hundreds of projects annually

The files are organized by Year on shared drive. Each Year has a folder (2014, 2013… all the way to 1999)

Each Year Folder has sub-folders with Names of Customers served during that year (Customer A, Customer B, etc.)

Each Customer Folder has sub-folders with Names of Projects executed for that customer (Project A, Project B, etc.)

Each Project Folder contains Documents that are part of certain project (Project Charter, Project Proposal, etc.)

Your Task…

It’s 4:45 PM and you have to leave work at 5 PMto pickup your kids from school. Your boss hasasked you to pull ALL Project Proposals forCustomer B ever completed. Good luck!

Your problem…

Each customer folder (i.e. Microsoft), containstens of projects. Each of the project folderscontains 1 to 3 versions of proposals. Oh yeah,and you have folders from 1999 to 2014…

3 Proposals3 Proposals1 Proposal2 Proposals

Your reaction…

Business Case Against Folders

1. Usability

2. URL length limitation

3. Moving File URL

4. Security

5. User experience

6. File duplication

7. 1 Lonely View

8. Can’t Sort & Filter

9. Change is hard

10. Lost documents

11. Navigation

12. Cost

For more info and detailed description on above reasons, check out this blog posthttp://sharepointmaven.com/12-reasons-folders-sharepoint-bad-idea/

Intro to Metadata

What is Metadata?

Metadata is data that describes additional information about a file or a document

Example: Word Document “Project Proposal.doc” might have the following metadata that further describes what the file is about:– Customer Name

– Project Name

Surprise! You are using Metadata every day!

Check out 3 examples on the following slides

Metadata Example # 1 – Amazon.com

This is all metadata!!!

Ever done online shopping?

Metadata allows you to easily filter by shoe size, style, brand, etc.

Imagine if Amazon organized shoes in Folders by Brand – how would you find all the available shoes for your size?

Metadata Example # 2 – Facebook

Have you ever Tagged people on Facebook?

Ever wondered how Facebook manages to pull your friends’ photos from various albums?

Imagine if Facebook used hierarchical folders to organize photos of your friends?

Metadata Example # 3 – your computer

Thanks to metadata - you can sort by file size, document type and file name on your PC1. Right-click on any file name

2. Choose Properties

This is all metadata!!!

Let’s switch to SharePoint now

Screenshots and instructions captured on following slides are based on Office 365 SharePoint

Same exact functionality exists in SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 andSharePoint 2013

Solving the mystery of SharePoint Metadata

Default SharePoint Metadata

Recognize this? They are default columns you get with any

SharePoint Document Library

Data in columns is actually… Metadata!!!

That’s right, simply put, Column info = Metadata

Default SharePoint Metadata – cont’d

Previous example showed a single document uploaded to Document Library

No customization was done to the Document Library whatsoever

So, to create your own Metadata, you basically need to create new columns with properties (metadata)!

Solving the folder problem with Metadata

To make it relevant, let’s use the example from few slides ago on project documents stored in Folders (Years) and Sub-Folders (Customer Name and Project Name)

Let’s solve this problem by using SharePoint Metadata! (sorry, columns)

Time to get intimate with Metadata!

Access Document Library Settings page

Click on Document Library name

From Ribbon that appears up top, click on Library Settings

Settings page will appear – this is the main control panel for your document library

Settings page has 3 sections – let’s get to know it little better

Section 1 – Settings & Permissions

Worthwhile to browse through and get familiar, but don’t worry about this section for now, we don’t need it to create columns (metadata)

Section 2 – Columns

These are default (out of the box) columns (metadata) you get with SharePoint Document Library

This section is where you can control your columns (metadata) by creating new ones, editing or deleting existing. This is where we’ll spend most of the time

Section 3 - Views

Views help you slice and dice your information This is where you can organize your documents

according to metadata created Remember the shopping site example where you

could filter by shoe type, brand, price or size? This is where we will tell SharePoint how to organize data for us in the context of the documents

It takes TWO to TANGO!!!

Metadata success depends on two components:

Columns & Views

Creating Columns

Let’s create a Column called “Year”

From Library Settings Page, click Create Column

Create Column Screen

Enter Column Name– In our case “Year”

Different types of Data– We want to choose from menu

Optional, skip for now

Let’s make this field mandatory

This is where we specify all choices for the column

And that’s how we want to choose the data (from drop-down)

Let’s repeat for Customers, Projects and Document Types

Success!

We got our new columns appearing on Settings page now!

Let’s Test Drive what we created so far…

Go ahead and upload a new document to the document library. See anything different?

Yes! You are now presented with additional screen prompting you to choose the metadata we just created. Choose it from drop-downs, hit Save

Customized Document Library

This is how document library looks like after tagging the docs

4 new columns with metadata now appear By the way, you can always change

tags easily by clicking“Edit properties” on the file

Let’s upload few more docs

Some Quick Wins with Metadata

1. Click on Drop-down next to column name to filter based on metadata

2. Click on any of the Column names to sort by that column

Try that with folders!

Creating Views

Create a custom view

By Default, you get only 1 view called All Documents

Let’s now create alternate views to make use of the metadata

Once again, you will need to go to Library Settings

All the way at the bottom of the page, click Create View

On next screen that comes up, choose Standard View (most frequent type)

Give your View a Name

Give it a name and specify whether view is for yourself only (personal) or everyone to enjoy (public)

Which columns to display in a View?

This is where you control which columns to display and also in which order (from left)

Let’s uncheck Year and Customer and only display Project Name Column

View sorting options…

This is where you can choose how to sort things Let’s sort it by Project Name and then by Created

View filtering options…

You can then specify if you want to filter for certain data

You can “build” sorting and filtering into the View, so you do not have to manually do it all the time

Grouping – As close to folders as it gets!

Grouping allows to group (roll up) files by common/identical metadata (columns)

Click the + Sign next to Group By That’s where we can specify how to group data In our case we want to group by Year in descending order

(2014, 2013, 2012, etc.) and by Customer in ascending (alphabetical) order

Success! Our data is now organized by Year! Let’s expand the Year’s group – we also see roll-up by

the Customer (remember on previous slide we told to group by year and then by customer?) It did just that!

Success – cont’d

Let’s now expand the customer group as well

We now have all our files organized neatly in groups (bonus - it even tells you # of files in each group in parenthesis)

Important!

SharePoint only allows Maximum of 2 levels of groups in a view (i.e. Year & Customers, Customers & Projects)

However, You can easily create as many additional views as you want to slice and dice the data the way you want

Remember that “Get all proposals” Task from Slide 5?

Creating a view in under 1 minute…

Create a view called By Customer

Filter on: Document type is equal to Project Proposal

Group by Customer, then group by Project

And here we go…

What’s in it for me?

So, which scenario do you prefer?

Cool stuff you can do with Metadata

Lots of Views

Sorting

Grouping

–2 levels max

Filtering

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What if I need to upload multiple documents at once? Do I need to tag each one separately?

A: For most users, you are better off uploading one by one. However, you can also use Datasheet View (called Quick Edit View in SharePoint 2013/Office 365)– NOTE: you have to use Internet Explorer Browser for

this feature in SharePoint 2007, 2010.

Example: Datasheet (Quick Edit) View

You can edit metadata right in this Excel-like Table. Saves lots of clicks and time!

Frequently Asked Questions, cont’d

Q: So, are folders a big NO in SharePoint?

A: Not necessarily. Under certain circumstances they work

– Flat structure (i.e. Photo Albums)

– Very structured document environment that whole organization follows

Frequently Asked Questions, cont’d

Q: I used to set permissions (security group access) at a folder level. How would I do it with meta-data if there are no more folders?

A: The best practice is to control security at a site level. Managing security at a folder, or worse – document level, is a nightmare. Determine different levels of security you need and organize data in corresponding sites and document libraries

Convinced that Metadata is the way to go?

Need help with SharePoint?

SharePoint Site Configuration and Customization

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THANK YOU!

Visit: sharepointmaven.com

Email: greg@sharepointmaven.com

Follow: @gregoryzelfond

Connect: linkedin.com/company/sharepoint-maven

View: www.slideshare.net/gzelfond

Get in touch if you have questions

document management in sharepoint without folders - introduction to metadata

customer project

project folder

project b

year customer

year folder

word document project

following metadata

names of projects

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