Importance of Metadata Standards

Rather than "reinventing the wheel" for every document library, it makes sense for the organization to come up with some standards for the different types of libraries that will be used and to encourage different departments, teams, and other groups to use these standards.

For example, in this lesson we looked at a document library in the ProServices site that had additional metadata: Document Owner, Client, and Document Status. A user of this document library might visit another department's site (Marketing, for example) and find a completely different group of metadata added to the document library, which steepens the learning curve for that library. A lack of standards also makes it more likely that users will need help finding what they want, which takes away from the benefits of the document management process.

NOTE

From a management standpoint, having the same metadata in two libraries means you can move or copy documents from one to another and the metadata will come across. If there are differences between the two libraries (for example, the column titled Client doesn't exist in the new library), the data contained in that column will be lost. It is also possible to create a template document library with all the same metadata so that when someone creates a new document library, he or she can simply choose the template.

It is also important not to overdo the number of metadata columns added to any one library. In the same way that an Excel spreadsheet with too many columns can be hard to read and hard to use, a SharePoint library with too many metadata columns is simply harder to read. More importantly, users uploading documents will be asked to input a great deal of information, which takes time and effort, and they may skip fields, take shortcuts, or simply avoid using the document libraries altogether.