Filtering with Metadata Navigation

One of the features in SharePoint 2010 that doesn’t seem to be getting much coverage or usage is around the Metadata Navigation options.  In my role I often get asked about folders and should or how can an organisation move away from folders in SharePoint.  The answer is often it depends and what information do you have, but Metadata Navigation can be used as a good way of keeping some of the feel of a folder view.

The key is always to ensure the correct metadata is applied to the documents very similar to saving the file in the correct folder in a file share.  So for example I may save a document into a library and assign the metadata based on the Country and Department.

Now we can configure the Document Library settings under Metadata navigation settings.  But first we must ensure the Metadata and Navigation Filtering feature is enabled for the site you are working from.  Once we have done this then we will see the option appear in our library settings:

Options in here allow us to choose the Navigation hierarchy and any key filters we want to query on.  In this example I have used Country and Departments to navigate through and Project to filter on.

This will then effectively add a navigation control and filter control to the left navigation when viewing our document library.  From here we can navigate through our Country and Departments information to locate the content we want.

Additionally we can filter by project from a query.  This can be useful when you aren’t displaying all your metadata in the view but still need to filter the content from a column not often displayed.

Although the filter control may not be an option used with most libraries it is available, but I think the key control is the metadata navigation as it is another tool we can use to give users a feel that isnt to different to their previous way of working.