Customise SharePoint access through Windows Explorer

Question

We are developing a document management solution, the taxonomy is quite complex and needs to be able to scale above 200gb. We have developed a proof-of-concept where the corporate taxonomy is presented as a tree view (reading from the term-store) when they click on a node they are taken to the document library where documents with that metadata tag are stored (the location that each tag should be stored in is maintained in a SP list). Multiple nodes with the same tag will be stored in the same library.

From the browser this all seems to work very well, however it is a problem from within Office and Windows Explorer as the user doesn't know which site collection the documents with a specific tag are located in.

My question is: is there a way to control and customise the folder strucutre that SharePoint presents to Office and Windows Explorer, i want to present a virtual structure to the user that maps to the real structure.

The whole point of this is allow us to scale very easyily as we can add new site collections containing libraries, and map the taxonomy to them.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Toby

Answer 1

I haven't seen anything such built. I think your only option is a custom WebDAV provider, even though I should not recommend that.

Instead consider you current solution and incorporate Document Routing in your design. Let the user upload the document to ONE location and set the metadata, then use document routing forward the document to the correct location. But that's for saving/creating only...