I had to train those users about the SharePoint library best practices, uses of metadata in a document library etc by highlighting the difference between folders & using metadata in libraries
| Category | Folders | Metadata |
| Familiarity | Folders are very familiar to the users and easy to create & relate it to windows explorer, network drive. | When the file is uploaded to a library with metadata columns, the user needs to tag or provide value for those columns which might need a little training. However, some columns can be defaulted if we plan the information architecture properly. For example, all the document libraries created in Sales site can have a metadata column "Department" defaulted to "Sales". Or the metadata column called "Document Type" in a "Training Documents" library could be defaulted to "Job Aids" etc. |
| Navigation | Drill down & up to find the files. Very inconvenient. | You can group the files based on a column value. Less clicks & easy to find files. |
| Search | Folder names will come up in the search, however there is no way you can refine/filter the results. For example, a folder named as 2017 comes up in the search but if the files inside it doesnt have the year 2017, it doesn't comes up in the search. Also, searching for a report that belongs to the current year "2017 financial statements", the file name should have all those words. | If the SharePoint libraries are created using proper metadata columns and all the files inside it are tagged with the values, we will be able to refine the search results based the metadata column values. For example, when you search for a word "report", if you get 10000 results, you can refine the results by filtering on the department name, year, document type etc. given those are the metadata columns and added as refiners. |
| Forced Grouping | You will be forced to stick with the folder structure someone else has created. Some likes to create the folders in the following structure. Region->Year->Project Phase->Document Category. Others might like: Year->Document Category->Region->Project Phase structure |
No grouping. All those folders names can be metadata in a document library. Every document that gets uploaded will have metadata tag for region, year, project phase & Document category. Users will be able to filter based on the column values. The metadata columns can be created in a taxonomy term store to reused in content types across site collections or web applications. |
| URL Length | Since the folder name is part of the URL, deep folder structure is an issue as the URL character limit is 260. Although this has increased to 400 characters in recent version but the deep folder structure is still an issue | Metadata columns are not part of the URL. So no issues in using as many columns as we want. |
| Name Change | Folder name is a part of the URL. Changing the folder name changes the URL. Redistribute the link if you ever change the folder name.* | Metadata is not a part of the URL. Nothing breaks if you tag the file as job aid instead of support document |
| Naming Convention | Folder names depend on the person who created it. Changing them later will have the risk of breaking the link to the file or folder. | You can control the taxonomy terms or metadata column values globally |
| * SharePoint 2016 version now has feature called "Durable Links" which doesn’t involve folder or file name in the URL. No broken links if you change the folder or file name | ||
