One aspect of SharePoint that many companies find makes the program not very practical for them is the 5,500-item maximum document library per site. While this limit does not mean what you think it may mean, SharePoint does cap your individual document library at five, 000 files, which means that you will be limited to only five websites. Additionally, there is also generally no way for you to add any additional documents to this limit. This can make managing your own business files somewhat difficult unless you have a lot of free time, and SharePoint document libraries are usually very lightweight and simple to use. However, with so many free and commercial SharePoint templates available, it is certainly possible to manage your document libraries in Excel or other file formats.
Many companies find that they need to manage several e-mail addresses, contact information, calendars, project tracking, employee files, and other items within their office 365 business. However, if these documents are spread across various workstations across the company, it can be easy for one person to lose or forget about a particular document, which can create problems.
Moreover, the organization may be vulnerable to security risks if certain employees have access to certain documents and e-mail addresses without the permission of others. To remedy these issues, SharePoint developers have designed specific modules that allow users to consolidate all of a company's documents into a central location. This is often referred to as a "repository" and contains the folders, which can then be organized according to several different strategies, including the usual organization of folders by the department, by keywords, or by the actual name of the SharePoint document.
It is often necessary for organizations to allow employees to sort their files and folders by the most important items, such as the e-mail address of the person who created them, or the user's "to craft" tags. By using metadata within SharePoint document libraries, it is now possible for a user to categorize these files and then arrange them in ways that are highly efficient for his or her needs. These types of categorization options are also commonly referred to as "meta-tags" and can be implemented by creating a new table, form, query, or collection, and then managing the creation and collection of meta-tags within it. This makes it extremely easy for a business to arrange their documents in a way that makes it easy for everyone to locate and view them.
Aside from categorizing the files and folders, another advantage to using SharePoint document libraries is the ability to create revision sets. These are sets of documents, which can then be stored within the SharePoint and later made available for version control. This feature is often combined with a feature known as "incremental revision", which allows the user to perform certain tasks in a series of steps, rather than performing an extensive edit. These documents can be easily compared to the "orthogonally" stored documents within the company's servers, allowing a company to compare how changes are being made to the same document over time, allowing them to see what areas need the most work and make adjustments to it accordingly.
One last advantage of using SharePoint document libraries is their ability to help an organization effectively manage its workflow. This is because these types of libraries allow users to organize their project documents by folder, project, or time range. They also have the ability to group items based on the type of document, such as e-mails, brochures, etc., which allow for better organization and control over a person's workflow.
The biggest disadvantage of a SharePoint document library is that many of these services don't provide all the features an organization needs. Many of these services only offer a basic set of features, leaving organizations to rely on third-party services to fill in the remaining requirements. Most of these services also charge a monthly fee.
