Information is not very useful if it is disorganized and hard to find. Traditionally, electronic documents are stored in a file system consisting of folders and subfolders, often many levels deep. In computer lingo, this is often called a tree structure. You create the document tree according to your needs or whims, and then you share it with your associates. However, they may not understand your organizational approach, and so may have difficulty finding documents in your folders. For example, you may have a folder for each city in your territory, and within each city folder, folders for your customers in that city. In each customer folder, you store project specifications, statements of work, proposals, project status reports, and other documents related to that customer. But what if an associate simply wants a list of the current project status reports for all of your customers? This is pretty hard to get because status reports are scattered throughout your document tree.
This example shows the major limitation of using the file system to share documents: Because you have only one way to organize and categorize information, you must develop a system in advance that is useful for everyone, and which usually results in a compromise that no one wants. And once you choose a folder structure, it may become both difficult to change and difficult to teach to others.
With SharePoint, you can associate a great deal of information with documents by using standard and custom list columns. For example, you can customize a list to attach the information shown in the following table to each document:
Column Name | Column Type | Values |
---|---|---|
Document Status | Choice | Not Started In Progress In Review Final Draft |
Client | Lookup | Lookup to title column from Clients list |
Project | Lookup | Lookup to title column from Projects list |
Project Type | Lookup | Lookup to title column from a Project Categories list |
Due Date | Date and time | |
Assigned to | People or group | |
Owner | People or group |
With file sharing, it’s difficult to store this information and have it easily associated with a specific document. However, with SharePoint, you simply add columns to the document list. By capturing the appropriate information in the list, your associates can search and view the document library in the ways they prefer. For example, one colleague might search for projects by client, while another might search by author.
Once you recognize trends in how your team searches for documents, you can create custom views to match the most popular search criteria. For example, if users frequently search for documents assigned to them for review, you can create a view that displays a list of documents that have been assigned to the current user, and you can even sort the list in the order in which they are due. With custom list fields and views, SharePoint takes you out of the restricted world of file sharing and into a multidimensional world where each of your associates can see your documents in the most appropriate way.