If you ever had an important event approaching such as attending a wedding or a job interview, most of the times you would go through a selection of outfits and lay them in front of you. Once selection is made, you hang your outfit in front of you to have it ready to use on time.

The same principle is applied when it comes to tidying and organising your closet. People would most of the time either organise their closets by colours or type. The criteria used in this case is not important, it is the thought behind that process that matters. To save time, you would want to pick the most relevant clothing item for your event. The same applies when organising your digital information in Microsoft SharePoint. When set up correctly, it helps you easily identify and find your information. Metadata plays then a key role in the effective classification of information, which can then be used while searching for information or applying governance controls automatically. Just like organising your outfits, you may also dispose/throw away outfits no longer required. The same principles apply to your digital information. For example, retention labels and policies can be set based on metadata to periodically review and dispose information no longer required or that has reached the end of its retention.

When you use the “Search” feature in SharePoint, metadata automatically applied to stored documents can be used to filter the search results. Therefore, organising the information in your company is crucial for document’s findability, integrity, and trustworthiness.

So, next time you work with your documents think about organising and classifying them similar to the process you follow for organising your outfits.

Feel free to contact us if you need help organising and classifying your documents correctly in M365.