How do I add metadata to a Subsite?

Question

Okay -- admitted SharePoint newb here; apologies in advance, as I've been searching for 2 weeks to find a solution to this and SharePoint is not letting me find an answer.

We're using Office 365 (SharePoint Online), and I have a Site Structure like this:

Home

Projects

123 Project 1
456 Project 2
789 Project 3

Projects is a subsite of the base site, then project 123, 456 and 789 are subsites of Projects.

We have projects that are active and projects that are closed/complete. I'd love to add a column/field on the Subsite that shows "Project Status" so we can search/filter by open projects in showing the content in various views. I can't seem to find a way to do this at all through the user interface. I saw one method that MIGHT work through a REST API, but couldn't find proper documentation on how to do it either.

Appreciate any and all assistance!

Answer 1

You can't really add fields to sites. You can add properties to a site property bag, but that's not what you want to do here. I'll give you two options for doing what you want to do via list metadata:

1. Create a master Projects list on the "Projects" site, with your status column and a link to the associated project site. This approach has a few advantages: you can add additional metadata (region, business unit, project manager, whatever) to the list. You can use SharePoint column filtering and sorting capabilities to drill down into your list; you can create different views on it for different audiences. The drawback here is that you have to manage the data in two places now. Mature organizations will use an automated site provisioning process to manage this for them.
2. Your second option is to just manage this metadata in the site itself. One easy way to do this is to create a custom content type for the site's home page and add the columns there. The advantage of this is the data remains in one place. Also with this approach you can use Search to generate your dashboards, and they'll be automatically security trimmed, so users will only be able to see projects they have rights to see. Also, you will eventually break out of the single site collection model and the content type/Search approach will really start to show its value then.

Of course, you can opt for using both approaches and have the best of both worlds. In fact that's what I would do.