When working with document libraries you can use folders to structure your documents within the library. This is ok, but a better approach to structure documents would be by assigning meta-data to the documents and create the structure based on this meta-data.

But sometimes you actually do need to have folders. For example you have bunch of documents which belong together. You could ZIP them up and thus have just one item in the document library, but this will stop you from being able to edit those documents directly in SharePoint. With SharePoint 2010 you could use document-sets, but what to do when you’re stuck with SharePoint 2007? Well, in this case you have to use folders.

OK, so folders it is. But how can I add meta-data to folders? When adding new columns to a library these will be available for all documents added to the library but not for folders. Here’s a trick to work around this problem:

1. instead of added columns to the document library, create websitecolumns.
2. create a new content-type, which derives from “document” to hold the actual documents of the document library. Add the websitecolumn created in step 1 to the content-type.
3. create a new content, which derives from the type of “folder”. This content-type is being uses to create folders with meta-data in the document library. Add the websitecolmn of step 1 to the content-type.
4. in the document library activate the use of content-types and deactivate the usage of folders(!), since we want to use our own content-type to create folders.
5. add the in step 2 & 3 created content-types to the list and alter the order of the content-types in such a way the “document” type is not at position one. The first content-type of the list is always the default content-type and thus cannot be deleted. Once you alter the ordering you can delete the “document” content-type and just have your two custom content-types.

So now you can add folders to the document-library which also have meta-data. Interesting enough is the fact, that you can create a new content-type based on a content-type folder and then add this newly created content-type to the document library, but you cannot add the “raw” folder content-type to the library. However.