SharePoint 2010 – Folders vs. Metadata

SharePoint 2010 – Folders vs. Metadata <– This search will get you a ton of results from google. 

For a while I thought about ditching folders and only using metadata was the way to go, but that doesn’t work with all business requirements. Metadata should always be included, but sometimes folders are needed too. Below are a couple of questions that lead me down the path of including folders in a document library.

Will the users that have access to the document library have access to ALL documents in that library?

If the User responds “No” then I’m heading down the folder path. Security is one area metadata falls short. You can set security at the document level, but who wants to do that? I would rather have a folder and set the security on that. 

Will you use the “Explorer View”  as your main source to view documents?

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked via the “Explorer View” after a 500 or so documents have been added to a document library, but it’s useless without some kind of structure. It’s a laundry list of files and the users are forced to look at names of files to try to figure out what it is.