SharePoint Folders vs Doc Libraries vs Doc Sets - The RIGHT way to store documents

storing documents in SharePoint is surprisingly confusing because you could put them in a folder or a document library or a document set and you don't want to be saying later oh we should have gone with this other one cuz it's way better let's explore the limitations so you can make the right decision for this example let's pretend we're building an employee onboarding system makers that are new to SharePoint would come in here and make a new document library in this case I called it onboarding they'd start putting documents in here they would add all the employees drug test resumés and quickly start to see that this is a mess so they're like I know I'll come up here and use folders so they put the person's name create that and then take everyone's documents and put them in the right folders and let's say we need to store the hiring status of all these people as soon as we add a column things get a little weird if I throw in a single document into here if I click the three dots and go to the details of it I see all the columns and then maybe here I could add some hiring status if I want but if I go to a folder and then I go here and hit details I'm already not able to see anything but I guess I can come over here and edit grid and here I can add the statuses and it's like you know this is good enough but then something weird happens I click into one of these records hiring status is gone with folders you can inherit the properties or the values of the column and then you think all right I need to store this background check passed and then were their documents submitted on time but you know this hiring status I don't actually want to see this so I'm going to hide it great it's gone I put some values here and then if I go back to the parent level wait that hiring status column is also gone here plus it added these columns but it kept the values blank I hope you're starting to see how limited folders are while we're here some other weird things that tend to happen is if you mix folders with do doents like maybe the resumés all start out here before a folder gets created if I try to do things like alphabetize these it always groups the folders together and then the documents come after maybe that's the behavior you want but most people when you alphabetize you expect them all to be in alphabetical order and one more problem with folders is it's really tempting once you start making them to not be able to stop and you make folders within folders within folders it's not only confusing could lead to duplicate document but most importantly lead to this nasty message one day that says the file or folder name is too long Andrew hos was the original person who pointed this out makers eventually realize this so then they switch to a completely different structure where they just make a document library and they keep it flat all the documents here and if I really want to group all of these I can come over here and make a new view and in the view they can open up Group by and then they can Group by a column and the result is like this which is kind kind of like folders this works great the only weird thing is if I want to share something it works on one document at a time but if I try to select multiple documents I lose my shareability I originally learned this from Sylvie lero and I'm MBI Solutions having one flat Library like this and using this groupy to act as a folder is fine except what if you want child folders for instance what if the drug test should all go in their own folder for each person well now you probably have to make a folder and we already know all the issues of folders there's really one answer here that solves all your problems if you open up settings and navigate down the site contents and then you scroll down to an area that says site collection features there is a ridiculously undocumented perfect solution called document sets and you just need to activate them and if we head back and scroll into site content types and in here if you click on create content type you give it a name like employee onboarding doc set and then down here you choose document set content types and click create and in here add whatever columns you want in my case I want to store the employees name their state and gender I have a brand new document Library here called onboarding doc set and to add my document set to it I'm going to come up here into settings click on Library settings and under advanced settings make sure you press this button allow management of content types and then you could scroll down here to content types and add from existing and select your content type but we're not done yet if we click on employee onboarding and we scroll down to document set settings we get some superpowers for instance we can have a document appear in this document set every time it's created so I just added this word document called onboarding checklist and this is the money maker here I can choose which columns are going to sync from the dock set down to the documents so I'm going to choose uh full name gender State Province so now when I come in here and hit new I got this new icon called employee onboarding I'm going to click that and here I populate the columns maybe I name all the folders for the position we're hiring for and then I just click save and now we're inside the document set and if you're wondering what this document is this is that template I told it to make so every time it makes a dock set it adds this file if I open this file here's some template that the HR person has to fill out for every new position but here's where things start getting cool if I go to add columns and then I choose the columns I made when I created this dock set look at this they're automatically populated because these values came from the parent level but one of my favorite features is I have all my columns here but these are all the columns I care about high level when I click into here let's say I want to see different columns here so I'm going to change these these so hide some of these These are the columns we want to see inside of the doc set or folder so I'm going to save these and click save so here's my inside doc set view but when I go back it reverts me to all documents and when I click inside I'm stuck in the all documents view if I hop here to library settings inside of our document set settings our select view we can change it from all documents to inside the dock set now it's going to change so at the high Lev dock set level I see this but when I click in I see different columns how great is that oh and that sorting thing watch this if I shift them up yep the dock sets being mixed with other regular documents are still getting sorted properly what's also interesting is if you're inside a dock set you don't have the option to create a dock set anymore but you can take a dock set and drag it inside of one and then when you click inside of it there will be the child dock it's probably why people like the SharePoint MAV say don't you dare say anything negative about document sets cuz they're so terrific by the way Greg zalon has some of the best SharePoint content I've seen ex also you'll notice here if you press the three dots you have version history so you can see the history of this document set something that you definitely don't have with folders here's a handy guide to use when you're trying to make this decision of how to store documents and SharePoint now if you want to become really good at SharePoint I'm not your guide I'm I'm all about Solutions architecture and how all the Power Platform tools connect together but if you're looking for a SharePoint people you should go follow all of these people and check out their amazing content

Channel: Untethered 365

Views: 4,619

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Id: akxLB8sYamk

Length: 7min 41sec (461 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2024