Working with documents and SharePoint - Best practices
- by KunaalKapoor
Follow these simple guidelines to make collaboration using SharePoint easier:1. File Name:While it is allowed to use spaces in your filename (and maybe it seems even logical to do so), don’t use them if your file will end up (or is born on) SharePoint. When you use the “download a copy” functionality, SharePoint will replace the spaces with an “_”. This might (will) result in inconsistency when you upload the “same” file again, since SharePoint will see this as a different file (since the filename is different). I recommend using a filename with Capitalization style naming guideline. For instance: the document “Overall governance model.docx” would be named “OverallGovernanceModel.docx”Use the TITLE field in the office applications to give your document a title (and subtitle and keywords, .) The title column can be used in a view in a library. You can get to the document properties by clicking on 'Office Button/Prepare/Properties'. (Office 2007). This is metadata that is stored with the document, and will remain in the document (even if you exchange this document via e-mail, via an external hard drive). The filename cannot be longer than 128 characters. (and that is IMHO far beyond reasonable) You cannot use any of these characters: ” # % & * : < > ? \ / { | } ~ 2. Versioning:SharePoint has a built-in versioning system. You can work with major (published) versions, and minor (draft) versions. Of each of these two document types, you can store a numbers of versions that are kept. Watch out, each version is saved, not only the delta between 2 versions, and this counts to your Site Collection Quota. (Example: you have a Word document with a size of 2 MB. When you keep 5 Drafts this will result in storing (and consuming) 10 MB.So, don’t call your document “NewUserAccountProcessDRAFTv1.docx”, but “NewUserAccountProcess.docx” and use versioning setting in your library.You can enable views on your library to display the version number.You can enable the version number to be displayed in a Word document.3. Use MetadataUse metadata to assign other properties to documents, so it can be easily identified, sorted- or grouped by.
