Understanding SharePoint Metadata

What is Metadata? Metadata is an attribute. It is a way of describing or categorizing your content. Metadata answers questions like: What kind of document is it? What Topic does it cover? Which department is this document relevant for? When these facts are tagged to your document, it makes searching for the document easier.

SharePoint libraries come with default metadata. When you upload a document to SharePoint, SharePoint automatically assigns metadata to the document. Metadata assigned by default: Document Name, Created, Created By, Modified, Modified By. With these attributes being assigned to your document, you can easily find the documents created on a certain date or created by me etc.

The metadata being assigned to your document is stored in a column. Each column stores specific information. In the Created by column, you will the users who uploaded the documents; you will only see usernames. In the Created column, you will see when the documents were created; you will only see dates.

When you create a list or library, there are columns that are created by default. You can use these to organize your content. In addition, you can create custom columns to further organize your content. Example of columns specific for your organizations’ needs: Department, Location, Material Type, Customer etc.

In the image below, you can see several documents within a library. Each row is a single document with all its related metadata. Each column stores like metadata related to the documents.

Viewing the columns in the library settings (back end view):

Once you have metadata set up for your site you can filter, group and sort the content as needed. You can create multiple views each with a different display, highlighting different metadata for your content.

Examples of using metadata to organize content:

1. Filter: Show all documents created by [Me], Documents created in the past 2 years
2. Grouping: Group documents by Department, then Material Type.
   Note: You can group on up to 2 columns. You cannot group on a columns that allow multiple values.
3. Sort: Sort content so the latest modified documents display at the top

Note: See post on Remove Group Headings to remove the Column displaying before each value.

Folders vs Metadata
Once you are comfortable with metadata, you can replace folders with metadata to organize your content.

Here are some reasons to use metadata instead of folders:

1. Hierarchy – Folders are set in a specific hierarchy that can not be changed easily. There is only one way to view the content in folder. While metadata allows you to view your content in different ways and easily change the default display of the documents. Each user can filter, group and sort the content to suit their needs. Additional views can be created to target different user needs.
2. Moving Documents – When a document needs to moved to a different folder you have to physically move it. This changes the file URL, potentially breaking links to the document. With metadata, you just need to update the tag associated with the document and then it can be found under the new metadata tag and most importantly the URL stays the same.
3. URL Length – SharePoint limits the length of your document URL (256 to 400 characters based on your SharePoint version). Every folder and sub folder leading to your document becomes part of your document URL. If you nest too deep, you will not be able to upload your document in the deeper folders. With metadata, adding more metadata to organize your content doesn’t affect your URL.
4. Empty folders – Many times users created placeholder folders that never get populated. When searching for content users have no way of knowing if the folder is empty or not and waste a lot of time searching through empty folders. With metadata, the value can be available for the user to apply to their document but if the metadata if not used it won’t display in groupings. In addition, when you group the content it tells you the number of documents tagged for that metadata.
5. Data Integrity – Folders can be created by any user with edit permissions. Many times this leads to a free for all; folders being created with typos, meaningless names etc. With metadata, only users with higher permission levels can create columns, determine the metadata values available etc. This forces users to use the metadata available. You can create columns that allow for free text but I would minimize the use of these columns to avoid the free for all scenario.