Document Management in SharePoint 2010

Document management is a function that is needed by every company, and although they have various requirements the basics are always very similar. The former SharePoint versions have made a lot of great things in this area, for example version management, content types, etc. I didn't know how can be improved this are in the next version, but for my greatest happiness it did!

Let's see how!

Most probably you'll hear the expression "metadata management" related to SharePoint 2010 very often in the future. I don't want to deep dive into this topic right now, it'll be a separated post soon. But to put it in a nutshell, with managed metadata you'll be able to create centrally managed taxonomies and use them across your sites, moreover you'll be able to navigate by these metadata. In my small example, I have a document library storing contracts with a custom property called State.

The metadata based navigation can be based on the managed metadata as well as some other list properties, eg. Content Type or choice columns. If you'd like to imagine how it seems, here you are:

The administration of this navigation is also pretty easy. If you’re going to the Library Settings page, there’s a new command “Metadata navigation settings”. Basically, you can set three things here:

• Navigation Hierarchy: You can set navigation fields based on the following types: content type, choice, managed metadata. These properties are enumerated here, and you can choose from them by your needs.
• Key Filters: The SharePoint 2010 has the capability to give the users not only a tree-view like navigation but typing in fields too for make the navigation easier.
• Manage Indices for metadata based navigation, for an improved performance.

The second thing that is very often required by real users is a kind of document sets: the ability to collect, order and show documents stored spreaded across your sites together, in a collected way, with the ability to manage common metadata. Good news, you can do it with SharePoint 2010! Document sets are live, moreover you can start workflows to the whole document sets instead of the separated documents. Wow!

Finally in this post, I have to mention a very useful capability that had to implemented as a custom solution before: every documents get a unique ID, called Document ID that is independent of its location, metadata or anything else. This is unique like an ISBN of the books, so you can refer them from anywhere, anytime even if the document has been moved inside the site collection.

So, that’s it for today, but more to come, stay tuned! See you tomorrow, or if you’re here at the SPC09, feel free to say a Hi! or follow me on twitter @molnaragnes!