Pros and Cons of the New Folder Tool

An icon for the New Folder tool will be available for use to the right of the Upload Document icon, if the library administrator allows the creation of new folders in the document library (accessible from the Document Library Settings page, Advanced Settings link). If the New Folder icon is clicked, the folder can then be named and used to store documents or other folders. Folders can have unique permissions assigned to them, users can create alerts based on the contents of folders, and they can be connected to Outlook, but they are not as manageable as standard items in a document library. For example, metadata columns added to a document library will not be editable for a folder in that document library.

There are various stances about the usefulness of folders in SharePoint that have been argued for years. One point of view is that folders should not be used in SharePoint because they can be seen as keeping alive old and possibly bad habits from file shares. Extending this train of thought, folders in SharePoint are familiar to users, and comforting to less-sophisticated users, and so can have value in their familiarity. Savvy SharePoint document library administrators know that views can be created in document libraries that completely ignore folders and display all contents in a flat hierarchy. Savvy administrators also know that folders can have unique permissions applied to them but also have lived through the difficulties involved in managing document libraries with folder-based and item-based permissions.

Another “minus” of using folders in SharePoint document libraries in SharePoint 2007 was that they made navigation difficult, and it was difficult to see “where you are” in the folder hierarchy. However, SharePoint 2010 now provides an elegant navigation tool, as shown in Figure 19.10, available from the Navigate Up tab to the left of the Browse tab, which clearly shows the folder structure and makes it easy to navigate up the chain to a higher-level folder.

Figure 19.10. The Navigate Up tool in a SharePoint document library.

A plus of using folders in SharePoint 2010 becomes apparent if a user accesses the drop-down menu of a folder and then clicks the Connect to Outlook icon. By following the prompts that then appear, assuming the user has a current version of Outlook client installed, he can link the folder or subfolder to Outlook and have the contents of this folder available when offline. This is a handy way to synchronize a portion of the contents of a document library with the Outlook client, rather than synchronizing the entire document library, which could be many megabytes or gigabytes in size.

Finally, the use of folders in SharePoint document libraries that contain many thousands of documents can speed up the performance of the library. For example, a document library with 20,000 documents that doesn’t use folders may perform more slowly when a user is using filters to try and find the document she wants, whereas if these documents were split up among 20 folders of roughly 1,000 documents each, the performance within each folder should be faster.