SharePoint 2007: Single Document library vs. Multiple Document Libraries

I often come across this question from customers or in forums about what is the best option to use a single document library vs. multiple document libraries in SharePoint site. However, choosing the best option is completely depends on the requirements to use single vs. multiple document libraries. There are different pros and cons associated using single vs. multiple document libraries.

What is a document library?

Document library is a location in a SharePoint site containing files of one or more content types. In SharePoint, by default everything is stored as content type. Example: By default, documents in a document library are stored with a “Document” content type. Document libraries are designed to manage and store related documents and lets users to create new documents of appropriate types.

Single Document Library :

·         Use a single document library if you have a requirement to store all of your documents in a central repository. So, you can view all the documents at one place, i.e. using group by views. Example: By Region, Country, or Year etc.

o   Permissions are not a constraint and would like to open the library for Read/Contribute permission users. i.e.  Users of the document library can see all the documents irrespective of read write permissions.

o   Require to group the documents based on specific category in a single view

Benefits for storing Documents in a Single Document Library:

·         Users can easily add new documents or find existing documents with a single document library

·         Document Management settings such as permissions, content versioning, and approval are applied at document library level

·         Multiple views can be created to view the documents in different groups and views created by using the user interface are bound to a particular library

·         Can attach Information Management policies, such as Retention, Auditing etc. to a document library level

Document Library Storage Limits:

·         The Maximum recommended size of a library is 10,000,000 documents (yes, 10 million documents).

·         Cannot apply unique document management settings such as require checkouts or versioning for specific documents.

·         Adding multiple content types to a single document library creates more confusion for the users if those content types have multiple metadata columns. To remediate this issue, use fewer content types in the document library

·         The performance of the views of content degrades when the number of items viewed exceeds 2,000 items. There are two recommendations from the Microsoft to remediate this issue.

o   Organize the content in the document library into folders each containing 2,000 of fewer.

o   Or, Create views that take advantage of indexed columns to return set of 2,000 or fewer in a view.

** I would recommend, creating views which returns 1,500 items instead of creating the folders yields the best performance. Folders cause lot of confusion, use metadata instead. **Folders are bad metadata is good!

Pros:

·         Can view different categories of documents in a single view.

·         Permissions can be managed centrally

·         Single point of truth

·         Less administrative over-head

Cons:

·         Cannot manage the permissions based on views, i.e. if user has read access to the document library, he/she can view all documents in the document library irrespective of filters, views unless you break inheritance for individual documents or use folders to restrict permissions. However, using folders or setting item level permissions is not a best practice since this complicates the permissions maintenance in long run.

·         Users may get over-whelmed with additional metadata fields need to be filled out

Multiple Document Libraries:

Use multiple document libraries if you have a requirement to restrict users from specific type of documents. Need to fill less metadata values by users. More are less like folders structure.

Pros:

·         Easy to setup the libraries

·         Less adjustment for user, as it is more like a folder structure

·         Unique permissions can set on individual document libraries

Cons:

·         More administrative over-ahead, as settings need to be configured on individual document libraries such as versioning, check-out, and information management policies etc.

·         Cannot view all documents in a single view or by grouping

Managed Metadata and Hierarchical Dropdowns

Cascading/Filtered dropdowns is the most required feature for SharePoint 2007 users which is not available by OOTB (out-of-the-box-). There are many third party custom features available to provide this functionality for cascading the metadata values from one to many levels. Most of you aware of Data cogs solution for the same.  Unfortunately, Microsoft has not introduced the cascading functionality out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2010 as well. However, using managed metadata feature and metadata taxonomy /enhanced lookup columns, we can simulate the similar behavior. But this is only a workaround since user has to drill down the taxonomy tree view to select the appropriate cascaded/filtered value. In this article I am going explain the hierarchical functionality using managed metadata.

What is Managed Metadata?

Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for items in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. A term is a word or a phrase that can be associated with an item and term sets are collection of related terms in SharePoint Server 2010.

SharePoint Server 2010 includes the Term Store Management Tool, which you can use to create and manage term sets.  A user requires appropriate permissions to use the term store management tool.

Example: You can create a term set for Finance department which includes metadata related to Country, State, City and Financial Institution etc.

Using the above mentioned metadata taxonomy we can easily achieve the metadata hierarchical functionality in other way around by drilling down the tree view to appropriate metadata value.

To use the above mentioned taxonomy, create a new site column or list of type Managed Metadata. I am creating a list column to simulate the hierarchical functionality in a list.

Configure Cascading functionality with SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata service:

I have created a new list called “Finance Contacts” and added Country, State, City and Financial Institution columns to it. Using the managed metadata columns, I am able to filter lookup values.

Here are the steps to create cascaded lookups using SharePoint 2010 managed metadata taxonomy in a list.

1.  Navigate to your SharePoint site and create a new custom list (In my example “Finance List”). Click List Settings on ribbon menu.

       

       

2.   In the list settings page, under Columns section, click “Create Column”.

3.  In the create column page, Type the name and description for the column and select the column type as “Managed Metadata”. 

                         

Note: Out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 doesn't support direct cascading functionality with lookup lists. If you select City, it won't change the "Financial Institution" values dynamically. User has to drill down to the texanomy to get the appropriate "Financial Institution" value. At least this functionalty is very much better as compared to MOSS 2007 lookups.

4.  In the Term Set Settings section, select the Country Term set from the Finance Documents term store.

5.  Optionally you can set Default Value for the “Country” field. This functionality is not available with OOTB (out-of-the-box) SharePoint 2007 lookups. With SharePoint “Default” option available in lookups and managed metadata columns as well.

6.  Click Ok to complete the configuration.

7.  Follow the same steps 2 through 6 to create other columns State, City and Financial Intuition.

Once the all columns are configured you can see the columns view as follows.

Now you can start adding the cascaded values by drilling down to the "Country" metadata texonomy (as mentioned in the above example "Financial Institution") to the SharePoint list.

 

**Note: Out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 doesn't support direct/dynamic cascading functionality. I.e. If you select "City" in the above example, it won't dynamically filter the values that applies to a particular City. User has to drill down to the "Financial Institution" manually from the texonomy (mentioned above) and select the appropriate filtered value. At least this is an improvement compared to MOSS 2007 lookups. User can easily drill down to the appropriate filtered metadta value using texonomy structure.