For the longest time, shared drives were the way that enterprises preferred to store and share documents. The down side of using shared drives is that there is no version control for documents, no search beyond the filenames, and the folder structures get convoluted over time, making it very hard for users to find and work with the right documents. Using SharePoint for your document management can resolve all of these challenges.
As Documents Management comes out of the box with SharePoint, many organizations that implement SharePoint for the first time don’t put too much thought into setting up their document libraries. They will often focus on the look and feel, the colors, put in the company logo, setup a few libraries, maybe add some metadata columns and open it up to their employees. But what they often find is that the acceptance of SharePoint is very low. This could be because:
-The shared drives are still available
-There is no clear ownerships and/or governance of document libraries so users keep creating new folders to store documents that really belong in a different spot
-The document library and folder structure is/grows just as convoluted as the structure of the shared drive was but with a different structure (and SharePoint doesn’t show the tree view as in Windows Explorer) so users have even more trouble finding documents
SharePoint Search isn’t setup properly
To avoid these pitfalls and enhance acceptance of SharePoint as a document management system you should take the following steps when implementing document libraries in SharePoint to replace the shared drives:
-Setup a clear library structure with a limited set of relevant metadata tags
-Define clear governance of the libraries and makes sure only a limited number of users can create folders
-For large libraries, use one or two levels of grouping to get a better overview
-Make sure that search works properly. When it does, users will even be able to search in the content of all documents in the libraries
-Train users on how to use the libraries, use sorting, filtering, checking documents in and out and using search to make sure they understand the advantages of using document libraries over the shared drives
-Migrate all data out of the shared drives and close them for good
-SharePoint offers more functionality and possibilities then just document libraries. But when replacing your shared drives is your first objective, you’ll need user acceptance on this step in order to successfully move forward on your next SharePoint projects.
