Patrickr Live

I received a great question from one of my customers today with regards to best practices around the usage of Folders versus creating new Document Libraries in SharePoint.

While there is no real best practice around this per say, there are a number of reasons you would use a Document Library versus a folder and vice versa. There are certain scenarios where you would most definitely use a new Document Library versus simply creating a folder within an existing Document Library. To determine which will best suit your needs, you simply need an understanding of what each brings to the table with respect to content management.

Folders can be used for two main purposes.

· To provide an extra layer in your Taxonomy for hierarchical navigation and organization of content by further sub dividing document libraries into smaller containers.

· To act as an extra layer of granularity for document security by creating folders to act as containers for documents that require separate permissions relevant to the other content within the same document library.

Whereas, Document Libraries are useful when you require:

· The ability to associate different document Content Types (templates) with a particular document repository. You may have a situation where you are creating a document repository that requires different document templates or a different combination of document templates than your existing document libraries. Content Types cannot be associated at the folder level as they are inherited from the Document Library you are currently in.

· The ability to set different Information Management policy settings such as audit, retention and content destruction on a particular set of documents. These settings are done on a per library basis so the need to set policies that differ from an existing document library would require the creation of a new document library.

· The ability to set different Information Rights Management policies such as the ability to open a document for Read Only purposes versus the ability to open a document for read, print and content reuse such as copy/paste/export.

· The ability to identify a different user or group of users as the owner of the document library for such things as content approval, the ability to undo document checkouts and move along stalled workflows. Since this is done at the library level, if you wanted to give this set of rights to a totally separate group of individuals, you would create another library.

All in all, the idea would be to create a library structure that is the least complicated for users to leverage since user adoption will be the biggest hurdle to a successful deployment. A deployment with may document libraries on a single site that attempts to create a flat hierarchy may seem easier in the beginning but becomes unwieldy as users try to figure out which library to store things in. A more compact hierarchy that has fewer document libraries at a the top level and uses folders to further sub divide related content provides a simpler schema to navigate with respect to submitting and discovering content.

The creation of a new document library versus a folder in an existing library should be qualified by figuring out whether the new repository will contain totally unrelated content to the existing content in an existing library or if the requirements dictate the need for different requirements in the areas of content types, audit/retention policies, information rights management or delegating content ownership.

Many thanks to Alex for bringing this great question to my attention...