Sat, 14 Nov 2009

SharePoint and Folders

SharePoint libraries support folders, but do they? Sure, you can put documents into folders, but you can't really do anything with them. You can't filter on, say, all the files in a folder and, from there, navigate the sub-folders. This is unfortunate because users understand folders. They know how to put documents into folders, navigate with folders, apply security based on folders and more. They do not understand keywords, fields, and filters. But, in order to take advantage of all the features of SharePoint, you have to implement the latter and really can't do much with the former.

So, how do you deal with libraries when you want to

• give users access and abilities,
• make sure documents are secure and can only be accessed by authorized users, and
• still have a system which makes use of all the wonderful things things that SharePoint is capable of?

You have to develop meta data if you wish to do anything in SharePoint. The key is to develop meaningful meta data and make it easy and mandatory for people to enter it. The ideal way would be to associate meta data with the act of placing a document into a folder. But, this has its drawbacks also. It means that users can't create meaningful folders without also adding the appropriate meta data.

There are also a couple of problems with organizing things in folders:

• Users tend to make deep folder structures.
  Humans seem to have this inate need to classify things and people tend to OVER-classify things. Structures get so deep and convoluted that they becomes useless except to the person who created it. Deep structures also make getting to documents harder
• An item can only be put in a single folder.
  Items may really fit in multiple folders, but you can only stick them in a single folder. You can design meta data so it can be filtered on multiple keywords, for example, to appear to be in multiple categories while remaining a single document.

But users don't understand meta data. It's a much harder concept for them than a folder structure and, because they are used to working with real folders and folders on the file systems, they tend to gravitate that way and away from meaningful meta data.

More later on taxonomy -- a fancy word for structure based on meta data.

posted 10:23 [/SharePoint] permanent link

Tue, 13 Oct 2009

My Adventures with SharePoint

"I'm not a SharePoint expert and I don't play one on television" (shows just how old you and I really are if you remember that quote!) I am a developer and, now, a SharePoint administrator and developer. So the blogs in this section are my experiences with SharePoint. They will include things I have found, done, experimented with, been frustrated by . . . well, you get the idea. Take them for what they're worth. Hopefully, they will be worth something to you. I hope to reinforce what I've learned by writing the thoughts down here.

posted 18:51 [/SharePoint] permanent link