Bulk Metadata Update for SharePoint

In this post i’ll give a sneak peek of a new bulk functionality: Update Metadata.

MOTIVATION:

While dealing with high number of documents/items in SharePoint, we might feel the necessity of updating some metadata fields with same values. Instead of modifying each single item on-by-one, obviously it’s way faster to apply one action in bulk.

For example, consider a project folder which contains a lot of project related documents with some common metadata, such as department, status, phase, owner, billing center, location, …etc.

Say you completed one phase of the project and ready to move to next one. Now, you know that while doing so, you need to update status (from draft to reviewed), phase (from phase-1 to phase-2) and owner (from person-A to person-B). Updating those 3 fields for a few documents could be easy, however when there are many documents to update, this process can get time consuming, boring, and inefficient.

Let’s take it a step forward. Say there are multiple content types enabled for your list/library and you still want to update metadata. In this case you’ll be given chance to update only common fields of those content types.

Take one more step in granularity. All common fields sound good, but what if you don’t want to update all of them at once. Say you don’t want to update Title field (which is pretty common for many content types) for all of them. In this case, you’ll also have flexibility to select only the fields you want to update.

Here note that you are not only applying your updates in bulk, but also you get to select items and fields you want to update.

So, in such a scenario, all you need is a bulk metadata update functionality… and now you have it!

DEMO:

In our demo, we have three test documents of three different content types: CT1, CT2, CT3.

I want to update metadata of first 2 documents, which are TestDOC and TestEXCEL. So i select those documents and go to Bulk Actions -> Update Metadata as seen below.

Now, in the next page only common fields of CT1 and CT2 will be displayed for you to update.

As you can see above, there is a checkbox next to each field. Here only the fields you select will be updated. Say you want to update fields Status, Subject and Start Date. Select those fields and provide new values for them.

Once you click OK, only above selected fields of the documents you selected (TestDOC and TestEXCEL) will be updated in bulk. As you can see below, status, subject and start date fields are updated for TestDOC and TestEXCEL.

That’s all. Simple and effective yet applicable to all lists and items.

Please let me know if you have any questions/suggestions/feedback. I could always use user feedback to make this more useful for business scenarios.

Zieglers