Searching through folders – Sharepoint continued

We have continued to make some excellent progress on the SharePoint front, with several departments having got a wide variety of pages, subsites, document libraries and resources available for their staff to use. We are on track to have SharePoint as out learning management system for next year. As the staff have gotten more confident they have been more daring in giving things a go so some of the designs for their pages are looking really good. So far the buy in has been good with some departments doing more than others, and a key factor being the ability to customise the site to their needs rather than being stuck to a template. However, a big request I have had is how to keep the traditional folder set up while making use of the meta data tag. Happily, SharePoint let us have the best of both worlds, although it still isn’t perfect it is making people much more likely to use SharePoint which can only be a win.

Searching through folders

I commented at the start of this process that there was a little resistance to using the metatag to sort data. Folders are ‘safe’ and familiar so people went ahead and made lovely folders in their SharePoint document libraries and used metatags on the documents (as this was one of the things you were prompted to do when you uploaded a document). Now people are finding the search terms really useful, and are frustrated that if a document is in a folder, it gets skipped over in the search. Thankfully (with some help from the ever amazing Liz Coup and Kevin from my school) you can change the search setting so the meta tags can be seen through the folders. The discussion was along the lines of ‘ if it gets people using it, then do it’ rather than keep resisting/forcing just the tags on staff.

I made a Mix to show how to modify the view that you can watch HERE.

Or, all you need to do is scroll to the folders button on the modify view option, and click show all items without folders

Eventually, I am probably going to go through and do this at the ‘top’ level for documents as this completely removes all the folders. But as people are learning, changing the ‘views’ seemed an excellent intermediate step. This way people can see how one document can fit into several different boxes, but still have the traditional file structure too.