Our organization has been trying to deploy sites for all of our divisions (finance, HR, etc) using our MOSS 2007 entreprise platform. Our Information Management team has come up with an official file plan for each of these divisions. The plan is to have one main document library created for each division. Each document library would contain a list of folders representing the official file plan approved by the IM team. The problem we're currently facing, is that some paths in the file plan are exceeding the maximum length allowed by SharePoint, thus preventing documents from being properly stored in them. One of the option we've been studying, is to have a new metadata column created for the documents stored that would specify what folder this document belongs to. Each folders is labeled with an ID number (ex: 1.1 Official Reports, 1.1.2 Financial Reports, etc). We can then create a view on the document library that would be grouped by this "Folder" metadata column, which will give the folder navigation feeling to the end user. One problem with this approache is that the folder hierarchy is not respected: ex: - 1.1 Official Reports MainReport.docx - 1.1.2 Financial Reports MainFinanceReport.xls In a real explorer world, 1.1.2 would be included under 1.1, and not below at the same level. Problem #2 is that our users are heavily relying on the Explorer View (WebDAV) for dragging and dropping files into the folders. Using this approach lists all documents as if they were part of one single folder when using that view. My recommended approach is to develop a custom web part to would reproduce the Windows Explorer experience, but display "virtual folders" based on the metadata properties available. This off course doesn't solve the Explorer View problem, but if my web part could account for drag and drop support, that would fit the users needs. Any comments on this approach? Good idea? Bad one? Already something out there doing it?Nikolas Charlebois-Laprade Microsoft Certified Professional Software Engineer and Project Manager

You must be missing the 2010 metadata navigation feature, aren't you? Any plans to upgrade?

Nothing comes from top of my head for 2007, I would consider to document set, meta data navigation in 2010. But still it depends on upgrade plan for your org. Cheers, ~Uday, http://www.mstechblogs.com/sharepoint

I agree with all here on 2010 and here's a semi possible solution, you'd need to do some heavy custom dev work but you would generate short urls... Here's just an example of something I've used in the past for this same issue with a global law firm. http://spurlshortener.codeplex.com/ Our SharePoint App Dev folks took the basic idea and created short urls for the deep (hard limit URL/File Name) long lengths. It was a site collection feature that was applied to the doc lib after it was created.Kris Wagner, MVP, MCITP, MCTS Twitter @sharepointkris Blog: http://www.sharepointkris.com/blog

Even in 2007 a possible (and simple) solution would be using an additional metadata on the folder content type that would be used to store the "display name" for the folder (in list views). Next, for the folder "real" name, a simple and very short name could be used (like 1,2,3 ...). This way you could really increase the number or folder levels you can have before having the parh length limit problem. The explorer view would still be usable, but of course the users would see the short name for the folders so it would be hard to navigate ... maybe you could use short acronyms for the short name, not too long to pose any path length problems and not too short to still allow users to be able to navigate.Florin DUCA - MCSE 2003 +Sec,MCTS conf/dev WSS3/MOSS, MCITP/MCPD SP 2010, MCPD ASP.Net 3.5, MCTS ISA 2006 - Logica Business Consulting, France