How Much Metadata?

Deciding how many metadata fields you will ask your users to fill in every time they add an item to SharePoint is not obvious. You want to add as many fields as are necessary to make the content easy to find by the people who will be using it. The issue is that if the people uploading documents don’t (or won’t) fill in the correct metadata, your documents become very hard to find. One way to ensure that metadata get entered is to enforce entry by setting the fields to be “required.” The required setting is an option for every piece of metadata you create. If you set this value to “Yes,” then an item cannot be saved within SharePoint unless that field has a value entered for that field (Figure 3-12). But this can backfire if people enter incorrect information just to be able to move on. A particularly insidious problem is allowing the use of “miscellaneous” or “other” as a metadata entry. This will result in all your files falling into the “other” category, which is as useless as leaving the fields blank.