Hello, welcome to AMTV, I'm Colinda, and this is the fourth video in the Records Management series. In this video, we're going to be discussing folders and metadata. Now they can both be used in SharePoint, but SharePoint does have the capabilities and the features to tag and use metadata to categorise your information. So I think why not use that feature? If you're unfamiliar with metadata, let me define that for you first. Essentially the dictionary definition is data about data or information about information. But an analogy I like to use to best describe it, especially when talking to future users of SharePoint and using it within the system, I use the analogy of a book. Now a book has a title, an author, a publishing date, a number of pages, a genre assigned to it, a little description on the back. All of that information describes the book, it describes the content and it describes what it's about. So that is metadata, it's information used to describe that book. So we're going to discuss some of the pros and cons of both metadata and folders. Some of the pros of metadata is that, well, you can tag the information in a consistent way. So you can come up with standard columns which contain the metadata that can go across the entire organisation and you would create those in the content type hub. You can also create them for the department to be used for each department, and then also used within each library. You have these standardised terms, so you know that the individuals are categorising documents using the same terminology. So it's a fantastic way to standardise and have a more formal taxonomy to do the tagging with. Another one is that it has greater search and retrievability. SharePoint has a robust search tool and it searched the content as well as the properties. So if you have properties tagged, with, let's say, a document type is often a common form of metadata and you have report or a policy or agenda, and that word is also within the content, that's going to bump up the search result. So that's fantastic as well and you can also filter and sort things by metadata tags, within the library or even just by searching. So again, fantastic way to find things and retrieve the documents easily. Another great benefit is that you can also attach things such as different settings, such as policies or workflows or templates to what is a called a content type - which is a collection of meteadata and the settings to be applied either across all libraries, some libraries or even just one library. Metadata is a great way to just categorise your information in a more structured formal way than folders. But it does have its cons. One of the cons is that it's only as good as the user uses it. So if you don't tag the information if you don't fill in the metadata fields, then it's not very useful is it. Another con is that it's quite different. Now, a lot of people are familiar with tagging, using hashtags and stuff like that on social media. So if you explain it to your users in a sense that yes, you're just tagging your documents with further information to help categorise it. That may be a way to relate it to them. But to try and get them to understand how metadata works within a library in SharePoint, it can be a bit difficult. Now let's talk about folders, the pro and cons of those. One of the biggest pros, I believe, within folders, is it's familiarity. Now folders are often used traditionally in a hierarchical format across and organisation and usually on a file share, like a network drive or a shared drive. Theymay be set up with the best of intentions - and let's say the top folder structure, the top level, is very organised. Maybe it's organised by the function of the business or the department. But when you start getting down into those sub folder levels, quite honestly you lose the logic, you lose the hierarchical structure in the sense that it just becomes, you know, folder upon folder upon folder. SO that can be one of the cons to it, that it can get quickly disorganised. So besides being familiar they're easy to create, any user can create them within a library unless that function is turned off. Change management is minimal, and also, you know, less time for training and setup. So some of the cons of folders is that you have the same problems that you did on your shared drive network, just transferred to a different system. Perhaps you have lack of logic in the strcuture. You have no naming conventions within the folders. You have the ability for any user to just continue to create folders at any level, and you have to remember that within SharePoint online, you have a character limit within the URL. If all of a sudden you're 10 folders deep, you've limited to how many characters can be in the title of the document. So you have to be aware of things such as that. As well, another con can just be that managing permissions at a folder level, if needed, can be quite difficult and you want to do it at the library level. Another thing to consider is that items that can be displayed are at about 5000, and so because each folder is also an item, you limit the number of items that can be displayed within the library, whereas if you're just using metadata, each of the documents is an item as opposed to having a folder too that are adding to the item number. So let me show you some of the features of a library using metadata. I mean, right off the back, you can see you have some colours here. That's a feature that was re-introduced earlier this year, that any choice column or date column can be easily colour formatted by using a simple feature that we displayed in one of our webinars not too long ago. Not only that though, you can create different views to help you organise the information that's been tagged. So in this library, we have one called document type and the different types of documents. We have, let's say these documents need to be reviewed, so who's going to review them. We have the review date that's been colour coded to show you things that are overdue, up and coming or are due to be reviewed today. We have a yes or no column, have these been approved, yes or no? You can easily sort and filter by that, and then we also have the department. So this is the all documents view, which basically shows you all the documents within the library. Now when you have 50, 100 or more documents, that might be a view, you know, that is a bit difficult to find what you're looking for. But again using metadata, you can easily sort and filter each of these columns. So let's say we want to filter it by policy. So for an instantaneous, easy way to find all the policy documents, that's very simple. You've just filtered it, and boom, there they are in front of you. Let's say you want a more permanent way to see things, so you can do what's called views and you create views based on the metadata columns. So for instance, I've created a view based on department. This is essentially - it could be compared to folders because you could have a comms folder, a facilities folder, a finance folder. But the difference with thte folders in grouping, is in a folder you'd have no idea how many documents are in there unless you open up. Whereas here in parenthesis, you know how many documents are within the comms group. So I click on the little arrow, oh and look, I further have organised it into what type of documents are in there. And now I know again, that there's one guideline within the comms department. How about facilities, look at that, there's 1 FAQ, there's 4 guidelines, there's 3 procedures and there's 1 policy. Again, I know right away, well that's a policy document from facilities, click on there, and there it is. And that's using the grouped view. But let's say I just want to actually create - okay, I only want to see the documents created by facilities because maybe I work in facilities and that's important to me. Well there we go, I've created a view for facilities and right away the metadata tells me so much information more than you can find in the folder structure. I know when this document needs to be reviewed, who needs to review it and whether it was last approved. Can you tell that in a folder structure? No you can't. Let me show you what you see in folders. You see documents and you see folders. And sure, we have the departments, so we know, okay documents that are in there are going to be comms related But we have no idea how many are in there, we don't know what type of documents are in there, we need to go in there and look. Whereas in this library, in the way it was done, we know exactly right away if I want to filter by comms. There we go, we know I have that one, I know it's a guideline, I don't even have to open it up. Whereas in here, all I have are the titles to go by, and this is typical. Often within a library using folders, you're going to have these loose documents that don't belong or don't go in a folder, people haven't put them in a folder. So let's say the facilities folder, oh, and then you have some more folder and you have to click on those. Okay so we have 1 document in there... 1 document in 1 folder? That's over organisation. Whereas if you just have it labelled - meeting room setup, that's a guideline it's with facilities, boom, you don't have to click 2 or 3 times to get to that file to know what it is. If I go into finance so we have 2019, we have accounts payable, we have accounts receivable, we have budget. Okay, so that makes somewhat sense, but what about if 2019 there's some accounts payable or accounts receivable documents in there? Then already you've lost the logic within your hierarchical structure. So metadata allows you to retain the logic because you're labelling it with what you feel is logical for it to be labelled with or categorised as. Folders and metadata both have appropriate times to be used. So when is that time? Well personally I think metadata can be used for, pretty much, anything you want to organise, if you have the appropriate catagories and classifications for each of the documents in the libraries. Folders, in a sense, are more appropriate for things such as case files or personnel files, things like that. Those may not be best managed tagged and using metadata. But folders would be quite appropriate to contain all of your employees files. So in this video, we've discussed some of the benefits, some of the cons to each of them, and when is the best time to use them. It is a decision that needs to be discussed and decided before the onset of implementation, because when you're consulting with your users, you are going to need to decide which is best for them and take into consideration their current work practises, but also the decisions that were made by those who are governing the implementation of SharePoint. Take the pros and cons, weigh them up and decide which ones you want to use. Thank you for joining us on this 4th video of Records Management.
