Companied who has adopted sharepoint as their document management system have some common issues for their document libraries, particularly in the case where a best practice is not followed for the document libraries.
The common issues that are faced are:
- Usability
- Lengthy URLs exceeding the URL length limitation
- Navigation
- Cost
- Large libraries exceeding the 5,000 item list view threshold limit
- Cannot co-author Microsoft Office documents
- Data save conflicts. Security
- User experience
- File duplication
- 1 Lonely View
- Cannot sort and filter
- Lost documents
- Change is hard
Most of the times companies ask us to migrate thier Network share files to the SharePoint Document library.
To fullu take advantage of the SharePoint, it is always advise to convert the file share system to sharepoint using the best practices.
1. DOCUMENT VERSIONING
Enable library versioning to ensure a complete version history is kept and maintained. This allows document changes to be tracked, and provides a mechanism to allow users to restore from previous versions if required and view details on past changes made.
Key benefits:
- Store Major and/or Minor versions on documents in the library, providing the option for restoring previous versions if/when required
- Track changes on documents.
INDEXED COLUMNS
To improve the performance of a large list or library, you can index a column. An index on a column enables SharePoint to quickly analyse the data in that column, even when working with thousands or millions of items. For a view to quickly filter through a large number of items, the filter must be applied to a column that is indexed.
Key benefits:
- Indexed columns in document libraries bypasses the 5,000 items list view threshold limit
- Improved performance and helps manage large libraries.
DOCUMENT LIBRARY NAMING AND FILE NAMING CONVENTIONS
Document libraries must have a logical name to make the document management solution intuitive to use and ensure content is uploaded into the correct location. This would improve user adoption and collaboration.
File naming conventions are recommended to be named in a logical manner and short to ensure URL length limits are adhered to. It is highly recommended to not use any special characters in folder names, file names and also in document library names. Special characters such as ampersand, are not to be used. Always use alpha and numeric characters only.
Key benefits:
- Logical naming of document libraries and file names improves navigation and makes the system more intuitive
- Shorter and more user friendly URLs and no special characters used ensures continual system availability and functionality with improved usability.
STICK TO ONE TYPE OF CONTENT PER LIBRARY
To avoid hours of adding tags to bulk uploads, using one type of content per library can save time. This means organizing content distributed across different libraries can aid in reducing time required to tag documents in their corresponding libraries.
What are the benefits of implementing this best practice?
Key benefits:
- Structure document libraries to store individual content types, shortening the time required to bulk tag documents
- Improves content organisation and find-ability.
USE METADATA INSTEAD OF FOLDERS
Do not use folders to store content in document libraries because this can cause issues such as users misfiling documents, documents getting lost in nested folders, and it’s more time consuming to navigate around document libraries to locate content.
Tagging is preferable because it is more flexible. It also means you can view items by different classifications, which enriches the functionality of your library. Metadata provides the ability to view the list of files in the document library in different ways that allows you to find content quicker and also produces quality reports that is virtually impossible using folder structures.
Key benefits:
- Better organisation of content
- Ability to filter and group content using metadata
- Provide useful reporting of content in document libraries
- Improved content find-ability
- Eliminates chances of documents getting lost in nested folders
- Minimises chances of content getting misfiled.
For more of the best practice ideas visit the next post.