Document Sets and Content Types

As I mentioned before, document sets are special content types in SharePoint 2010. You can manage them as any other content types: can assign workflows, properties, etc. and then associate them with document libraries. These steps can be done in your browser, but also in SharePoint Designer 2010. Although you can customize the OOTB Document Set content type, I prefer to create your own one as a child of the OOTB one, for example with the name “Demo Document Set”. If you’d like to make your document libraries document set capable, please follow these steps written in my previous post.

In case if you’d like to ask if it’s possible to add different content types to a document set, my answer is: Yes, it is! Just go to the settings page of your content type, click on “Document Set Settings”, and here you are! You can choose which content types would you like to use in this document set, add default content to it, set shared columns and columns displayed on welcome page, moreover you can edit even the welcome page from here.

After these settings in my example, your document sets can contain two types of documents: Document and Picture. And your New Document menu in a document set created from Demo Document Set content type is similar to this: