Welcome to our video on the advantages of learning what's possible with SharePoint SharePoint
libraries metadata and custom list views. If you're someone who relies on Office, OneDrive,
Teams and SharePoint on a daily basis but feels like you could be getting more out of it
or if you're a seasoned user who thinks they already know everything there is to know
about SharePoint then this video is for you. In the next few minutes we'll show you
how easy it is to implement SharePoint features that can dramatically simplify
document handling processes reduce frustration increase productivity and make
your whole team more empowered and successful. So sit back relax and in just a few
minutes you'll see how simple it is to create powerful effective SharePoint intranets. First we need to understand
why SharePoint and intranets even exist. When Microsoft Office was
released back in 1990 companies quickly began generating an excessive number
of documents that needed to be managed. Initially most companies approached
managing those documents by implementing shared network drives and giving each
department its own folder on that drive. However this provided only a partial solution,
as files were being accidentally overwritten and becoming increasingly difficult to find,
with each department having its own folder and lots of subfolders searching for documents
across departments also became cumbersome. These limitations LED Microsoft to release SharePoint in 2003 a powerful
tool for document management. SharePoint's strategy was to
give each department instead of a folder on a shared drive a small
private Team website on the company's Network a website that contained a document
library a library with features that would address all of the problems associated
with using folders on shared drives. These departmental SharePoint team sites
were arranged in a structure that mimicked the organization's management structure and the
structure of the folders on the shared drives. The structure was given a top site it would
act as the entry point provide navigation to all the department sites and also deliver
some valuable information to all employees. This is how intranets were originally structured suddenly instead of going to a folder on a
shared drive to work with their documents members went to their new Department intranet
site and into that site's document library. While these Team sites also supported features
to assist the team in their day-to-day tasks like a shared team calendar that they could all link
their Outlook calendars to an announcements list that eliminated the need to do broadcast email
and a shared team task management list, it was the document libraries and how they addressed
all of the problems of shared drives that was responsible for SharePoint suddenly becoming
the most popular product in Microsoft's history. So what was so great about
SharePoint document libraries, well versioning collaboration
custom metadata and list views. One of the most valuable features of a SharePoint
library is called versioning. Simply put this means that each time a document is opened and
edited and saved a new version is created. Basically when you see a document in a SharePoint
document Library you're looking at the most recent version of that document sitting on top of a stack
of all of the previous versions. Documents in SharePoint libraries when clicked on and open
will always show you the most recent version. However each document gives you the
capability of selecting it and looking at its version history every previous
version of the document where you're given the choice of just reviewing it or even
restoring it as the most current version. The versioning feature guaranteed that
important documents or even important portions of older documents are
never lost you can even go back into an old version of a document
and just grab a paragraph out of it. The benefits of versioning also motivated
people using the documents to leave them in the library where they were protected rather
than downloading them onto their own desktop. By going to the library opening a document
there editing it there and saving it there when they're done ensures that everyone is always
seeing the latest version of every document. Microsoft actually coined a phrase for this
concept which was one version of the truth. The benefit of knowing that you were looking at the
latest version of any document was significant. Collaboration support was another
revolutionary new feature. With shared drives a constant concern was the
possibility of two people editing the same document at the same time and valuable
modifications being accidentally overwritten. SharePoint Library supported a function
called document checkout this feature when activated would only allow one
person at a time to edit a document. It would still allow everyone else to read
the document but only one editor at a time when the current editor was through they
would simply check in the document which would then allow any other authorized
member to check it out themselves. This capability vastly improved the Integrity of
the store document. It's important to point out that modern SharePoint libraries have evolved the
document collaboration capabilities even further allowing the simultaneous editing of a document by multiple individuals without
risk of damage to the document. Today simultaneous editing of Microsoft
Word documents even displays the names and cursor locations of concurrent contributors
using unique colors for each contributor. Another remarkable advancement of SharePoint
libraries over shared drives was the ability to apply custom tags or labels often called
metadata to documents. Historically in a shared drive folder environment the only way
you could find a specific document would be to go to a top level department folder,
open it, read the names of the subfolders, open one of them and maybe a few subfolders
later start reading file names hoping to find the file you were looking for by
recognizing something in its file name. Even then all too often you were forced to open
the document and start reading it to know if it was truly the right one. The more documents you
have and the more folders you need to look in, the more frustrating this becomes.
It can actually reach a point when it takes so long to find a document
that it's faster to just recreate it. So where document versioning and document
checkout protect the integrity and the history of documents in SharePoint libraries,
the ability to add custom tags or metadata, to individual documents dramatically increases
the capability to instantly find any specific document or group of related documents
regardless of where they are in the Intranet. In fact you don't go looking for the
document, SharePoint Search does and it will instantly offer it to you unless
you don't have permission to view it. In order to explain this we're going to
need to touch on the concept of metadata. Even if you've never heard of the word metadata
odds are you've been using it for years. Here we are in a fictitious shared Drive
situation using Windows File Explorer. I'm going to enter the
accounting department folder and from there I'm going to enter Financial
forms. Here we can see that the First Column of information indicates the file type and we
can see Excel files Word documents and so on. The next column indicates the name of the
file. We also see that we have a column for the date the document was last modified the type of
document again and even the size of the document. These columns are called metadata and
we're all quite familiar with them. What many people don't realize is that this is
only some of the metadata associated with these files. If we right click in the header bar for
this list view we can see that there are other metadata columns that we could choose to display.
If we right click on the document and select its properties from the drop down and then click
the details tab. we'll see that we can even update many of these hidden metadata values.
Unfortunately this metadata is mostly hidden, inconvenient to edit, and not very useful
in helping you find specific documents. SharePoint on the other hand makes
it easy to create and fill out custom metadata columns in your libraries.
Columns that you can use to indicate additional information about each document,
making them much easier to find and manage. Let's take a look at how this
works and what it can do for you. First we're going to go to
a modern SharePoint site. This is a fictitious cookie company
called LSG cookies. As you can see this intranet has a top site with news and
announcements for the entire organization. We're going to use the top navigation to visit
their accounting site. Here in the accounting site, we can see that this also consists of a
stereotypical Department site with accounting announcements, an accounting calendar, etc.
Access to their libraries is over here. To begin to demonstrate the power of metadata
let's take a scenario where we have a folder on the shared drive for the accounting department.
In that folder are four subfolders that each contain a bunch of documents. We're interested
in moving those documents into a new SharePoint library in our SharePoint Department site and
then enhancing that library with some metadata. First we're going to create a brand new library,
we're going to call it accounting documents we're going to give it a description of important
accounting documents from the old shared drive. Then we just click on create and now we're
delivered to our new document library. As we can see our library is empty we can also
see that it is already displaying four columns of metadata, the file type the name of the file
when it was last modified and who modified it. You can also see that it's dying to let us add new
Columns of metadata which we'll do in a moment. First we're going to show you just how easy
it is to get files from our shared drive folder into our new library. Let's bring
in Windows File Explorer. Here we can see, in the accounting folder, on the share drive
there are four subfolders containing documents. All I need to do to bring these documents into my
new SharePoint library and begin using all of its features is to just drag them from the Windows
File Explorer and drop them in our new library. And now here they are in
my new SharePoint Library. So far we've recreated pretty much what
we had in the folder on the shared Drive but if we open the first folder you can
already see that I've got some metadata. I've got the file type with a little icon
that indicates that these are Word Documents. I've got the file name. I've
got when it was last modified and I've got the name of the
person who modified the file. One of the issues that I face in having
brought these documents in this way is that I have to open each of these
folders in order to see what's in it. I'm interested in Saving Time in the
future by making that unnecessary but I need to retain what category
each of these documents is in. I would also like to save time in the future
by being able to indicate the status of each of these documents and by status I mean if it's
a new draft if it's been approved is it obsolete should it be archived. I'm going to apply some
simple metadata to address these two issues. The first thing I'm going to do is to create a
metadata column called category and I'm going to populate it with the choices that represent the
names of the folders these documents are stored in. So I'm going to create a new metadata
column for my library called category and I'm going to give it the choices that I can
use as I import files or create new ones. All I need to do is to click on the add column
header and select choice. Choice will allow me to input several selections that I can choose
from when documents are added to this Library. Since I know what my categories are going
to be from the folder names on my shared drive I'm going to add the choices for
banking credit forms and statements. Now I have my new metadata column but
as you can see it's empty. I'm going to drag it a little bit to the left
to make it a little more convenient. Now for this first group of files I want to
populate that field with the word banking. I just open the banking folder and
now I could give each one of these documents the value of banking
as its category by selecting the document and editing the details of the
document but there's a much easier way. SharePoint document libraries are better than
using Windows File Explorer in that you can work with documents in a view that is similar to that
of using Excel. I just go up to the ribbon click on edit in Grid View and I can easily select and
even drag down values to update other documents. Now I'll do that with the
contents of each of the folders. Now that I've done that all of my documents
are tagged with the appropriate category. I can now save a lot of time working with
this Library by turning off the folders so that I no longer have to look in each
one separately to see my documents. To do that, I need to alter what is
called this library's current view. In a moment we're going to discuss how you create
document views, but for now, let's just modify this View and show the first benefit of using
a SharePoint library to hold these documents. I'm just going to go up to where the name of our
current view is displayed, click on the drop down and select edit this View. This takes me to a page
that gives me all of the controls for the view of the library that we're using. You see at the
top the metadata fields that are being displayed indicated by a check mark. Down at the bottom
of this list there is an option to show all of the files regardless of the folders that they are
in. I'm going to choose that option and hit save. Now I can see all of my documents without them
being obscured by folders, yet I can still see exactly what category each document is in. Once
more I can sort all of the documents in this library on their category or filter this view to
show me only the categories that I want to see Now let's add another metadata column to help us
understand where each of these documents is in its own life cycle. We're going to add another Choice
column and we're going to call this one status. We're going to put in some stereotypical document
status choices; draft, in progress, pending, review, rejected, approved, published, obsolete
and archived. When I save this new column, I can now use it as my team works with these
documents to indicate the status of each document This status column is going to allow me to make
some new custom list views that are going to save me a lot of time. I could make a view for
the obsolete files that should be archived. I can create a view for all of the documents that currently have a status of rejected
I know they need to be worked on. And I can take this list view of the
documents that require work and place it on the home page of the accounting site
to help facilitate the effort to fix them. The possibilities are endless. Beyond the benefits of a more manageable
library or the ability to create custom views all of this metadata dramatically helps
the internet's built-in search function. Search can use this additional metadata
associated with each file to help provide very accurate search results. And
once on the search results page the metadata is again available to help
refine those results even further. After discussing the advantages of
SharePoint libraries over shared drives, let's revisit the benefits
of a SharePoint intranet and how a collection of Department sites can
greatly benefit the entire organization. Beyond the libraries SharePoint Department
sites provide the perfect vehicle to coordinate the efforts of team members working remotely.
Shared calendars, departmental announcements, task lists, and document collaboration provide
the means by which a team can continue to work together effectively. SharePoint departmental
team sites have become today's digital office. Just as the capabilities of SharePoint libraries have improved over time so have the
department sites that contain them. While there is still a top site serving
as the entry point for all employees, there are now various Department site
templates designed for specific tasks and equipped with even more
flexible document libraries. Furthermore a diverse range of new
functionalities from process automation applications to business intelligence dashboards
have been added. Functionalities that are designed to be configured by the end user without
assistance from IT. Just as significant, Microsoft has recently created a centralized
function called Purview where organizations can create document management rules that can
pertain to every library, in the internet. Rules that can automatically ensure the overall
document management implementation is legally compliant, including retention rules that
can turn a library into a self-cleaning oven, with an automatically generated audit
report for what was done and why. Thank you for taking the time to watch this
video we hope that it provides valuable insights that can help managers and staff save time
reduce stress and boost efficiency. If you could share it with those who would benefit
we would greatly appreciate your support
