Taming SharePoint Document Management

One of the hardest things to do is to get people to put things in the right places. Even when you had “sub-sub-sub-sub” folders on your network drive, people still put things in the wrong spots. With the Content Organizer feature activated in your Document Center site, all they will ever have to do is upload their documents into a Drop-off library. SharePoint does all the routing based on content type and other parameters you set up. Here is how it works:

Plan to Succeed

Identify the various libraries you’ll need to house the different types of documents you have. Be clear about what goes where, why and how SharePoint should know it. Next in the planning process is to identify Content Types, or document classifications. For example, a contract is binding, executed, has an effective date, an expiration or termination date, parties, a currency value, etc. When you define a Content Type for the classification contract, you’ll want to identify the information you want SharePoint to use to classify it as metadata. So, if you want all contracts above a certain dollar amount, you’ll want to establish contract value as metadata. You do this in SharePoint by creating a column. Then you associate these columns with content types.

Get Ready

Create the content types you’ll need, making sure all the metadata you want SharePoint to act on, or that you want to be able to easily search by later, has been added. Now, you can create your site. By default, when you create a site, SharePoint defaults to the Team Site template. You’ll want to locate Enterprise Templates and choose Document Center Site.

Once it is created, activate the Content Organizer by going into Site Settings and under Site Actions, choose Manage Site Features. Look for Content Organizer and click the Activate button. This will automatically create your Drop-off Library.

Finishing Steps

Create the libraries you defined above and make sure in Advanced Settings that they can Manage Content Types. Add the relevant content types to each library. This will enable them to “receive” them from your Content Organizer Rules. From Site Settings, Site Administration click Content Organizer Rules, then Add Item. These rules are no more complicated to set up than Outlook filtering rules.

Go!

Now users can upload to the Drop-off library and let SharePoint do the heavy lifting!