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These documents will be on different parts of the SharePoint site. I realize you can upload multiple documents at a time, but does anyone have tips for organizing files before uploading?

Edit: Apologies, but I wasn't clear. I'm looking for tips to move about a thousand documents from a shared drive to a new SharePoint site. 10+ people will be moving the documents.

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The best practice (in my opinion) is to start by designing your Information Architecture. This will define the end result for how you want your data to be organised. It should include how your data is structured, what content types you have, what metadata is associated to it, what levels of access are required etc.

Your IA will then drive how you design your SharePoint service, i.e. you will set up your SharePoint sites, content types, metadata, permissions etc based off your IA.

This in turn will then determine how you import your data. If your data is already organised in a similar way to your IA, it should be quite straightforward to work through it, and bulk upload each group of files into their relevant SharePoint sites/libraries.

If your existing data structure does not match, then it might be easier to work through your SharePoint sites/libraries and pick and choose what data needs to be uploaded. This can be a large task, but it can be easily decentralised. If you can identify different content owners for your SharePoint sites/libraries, you can delegate responsibility for uploading the content to them.

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You can organize your files in what order you want, usually you have tree-based organizing and you can implement it exactly in SharePoint.

However it is not recommended as I got. Recommended approach for general use (as I know) is to upload your files nearly in flat order, and then create views and filter based on users' needs.

After all there are several standards for naming and organizing your files like Best practices for file naming (Stanford University Library) or ISO 15489-1:2001 and others.

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You can create multiple document libraries as you would like. This will have many advantages as you can set permissions for the necessary users as well as enable to be searched. Even within a single document library, you can have multiple folders so it gives you an organized look.

As mentioned earlier, you can create views and add them to pages so necessary documents will be displayed. You can also create additional columns which gives the opportunity to make further filtering if necessary.

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