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About Me
Gregory Zelfond
10+ years of experience with SharePoint
SharePoint advocate, blogger
Love to solve business problems using code-free, out of
the box SharePoint configurations
Owner of SharePoint Maven (sharepointmaven.com)
6. sharepointmaven.com @gregoryzelfondsharepointmaven.com @gregoryzelfond
Reason # 2: URL Length limitation
https://company.sharepoint.com/SharedDocuments/
Clients/Projects/Year/Agenda.docx
Folder Folder Folder File
The total length of URL (server name +
list name + all folders + file name)
cannot exceed 256 characters!
Server List
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Reason # 3: File URL
Moving file from one folder to another means
change of file URL!
Example:
OLD: https://company.sharepoint.com/SharedDocuments/Clients/Projects/Year/Agenda.docx
NEW: https://company.sharepoint.com/SharedDocuments/Clients/Projects/Agenda.docx
Did you share the file with someone by
sending URL to the file?
– When you move file from one folder to another, “old”
URL is no longer relevant…
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Reason # 4: Security
Managing security at a folder level is an
administrative nightmare!
20 folders in a library = 20 different security
configurations!!!
Also, each time you break the security
inheritance from site/document library, your
SharePoint performance is impacted!
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Reason # 11: 5000 item limit threshold
View cannot contain more than 5,000 items (folders + files)
Displaying a folder with > 5,000 files will cause issues
Metadata and indexing resolve the issue
To learn more, read this blog post: http://sharepointmaven.com/how-
to-overcome-sharepoint-5000-item-limit-threshold/
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Reason # 13: Empty Folders
Can you tell which folders contain files and
which are empty? With folders, you can’t
Metadata allows you to see how many files
belong to certain metadata property (in
parenthesis, when you group)
Better user experience!
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Reason # 14: Data Integrity
What’s the difference between 2 folders?
– Client A
– Client A, Inc.?
If you rely on folder name to carry important
piece of information (i.e. company name), you
are prone to data integrity issues
Possible issues
– Folder names can be misspelled
– No single naming convention
– You have to recreate same names somewhere else
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Should I never use folders in SharePoint?
Folders are great for:
– Small teams
– Informal file organization
– Short projects
Metadata is great for:
– Larger teams
– When documents need to be shared with lots of people
– When there are a lot of content contributors (users who
generate/upload files) and consumers (users who
find/access files)
– Any time you need to easily find documents
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