SharePoint 2010 and Folders

The pub­lic beta of Share­Point 2010 is out there for all of us to try who don’t have priv­i­leged access, and so now starts the time of deci­pher­ing the impact the next ver­sion of this very impor­tant soft­ware pack­age will have on us. One of the things that excites me the most is improve­ments in the abil­ity to archi­tect infor­ma­tion across your entire Share­Point farm with a meta­data man­age­ment ser­vice appli­ca­tion (for­merly SSP), and improve­ments in nav­i­ga­tion by meta­data. One thing I was not expect­ing to improve but has is the use of fold­ers in SharePoint.

The Con­tro­versy

Share­Point 2007 brought us great improve­ments to how we think about stor­ing and view­ing infor­ma­tion. With pow­er­ful options such as exten­sive meta­data options, con­tent types, and count­less num­bers of lists and libraries there were many options avail­able to us. The folder par­a­digm to stor­ing infor­ma­tion was still present in Share­Point mostly to ease the tran­si­tion from a file share to a web-based appli­ca­tion, and it led to a debate amongst infor­ma­tion archi­tects on whether fold­ers were a best prac­tice for stor­ing infor­ma­tion in SharePoint.

There were peo­ple on dif­fer­ent sides such as Paul Culm­see who see the issue dif­fer­ently than myself, but the good news is that Share­Point 2010 adds func­tion­al­ity to alle­vi­ate some of my con­cerns in using folders.

Set­ting Meta­data with Folders

One of the things I was con­cerned about was that fold­ers would remove the desire to cre­ate cus­tom con­tent types and meta­data and instead use the folder par­a­digm that they were used to from the file share. In Share­Point 2010 we can spec­ify meta­data for a folder (which has always been a con­tent type), and it will be prop­a­gated to the doc­u­ments con­tained within the folders.

Set­ting meta­data with folders

Views With­out Folders

In Share­Point 2007 was an explicit option to not include fold­ers within a view. This seems to me to be the best bal­ance between those who pre­fer a folder view to those, like myself, who pre­fer views that are grouped. I always dis­liked fold­ers (inside or out­side of Share­Point), because I felt it an imped­i­ment to opti­mal find­abil­ity (have you ever tried to nav­i­gate some­one else’s doc­u­ment folder?). This strikes the bal­ance between those who like folder views and those like myself who pre­fer grouped views.

Folder set­tings for views.

Meta­data Navigation

Now nav­i­ga­tion can be mod­i­fied out-of-the-box in Share­Point to allow nav­i­ga­tion by meta­data and con­tent types. Now I don’t have to mess with the ter­ri­ble tree view, but now instead I can focus on uti­liz­ing meta­data to opti­mize the nav­i­ga­tion expe­ri­ence. This adds quite a bit of ver­sa­til­ity in con­struct­ing the user expe­ri­ence for your end users.

Meta­data nav­i­ga­tion in 2010

Con­clu­sion

The Share­Point team has improved the use of fold­ers in Share­Point 2010, and they’ve also improved the expe­ri­ence to not use fold­ers if you so choose such as large list throt­tling so fold­ers don’t become a neces­sity. I hope you get a chance to play with the next ver­sion of this excit­ing platform.