Hi there, this is Quentin again. In today’s post I would like to introduce an exciting new content type that is used as an architectural component for organizing multi document based work products. Document sets fit between documents and sites. You can use document sets when you have a group of related documents to collaborate on, but don’t need an entirely new document library or site. Document sets provide a collaborative workspace where users can work on a related group of documents. Since the release of SharePoint 2010, I have seen document sets being used for a wide variety of scenarios internally here at Microsoft and with some of our customers. Some examples include research projects, software development specifications, knowledge management repositories, and usability studies.

Document sets are similar to folders, but when you access a document set you get a web part page that can be customized. When you upload documents to a document set they are displayed in a web part that works just like a document library view. Several document set features make it faster and easier to work on projects of related documents. Here are a few of these features:

• Shared metadata enforces the same metadata on all items inside the document set
• Default documents can be automatically provisioned when a document set is created
• A web part page called the welcome page displays the contents of the document set and can also be customized to display more information than just documents

Document sets fit in with our overall document management vision by helping manage the unmanaged and bringing collaboration and metadata into document creation and management. Document sets can be used to organize and find content and they make it easy to group and relate documents. Document sets encourage using columns for metadata on the document set itself and the documents within. Shared columns put document set metadata on all of the documents inside and it is useful to display the properties of the document set on the document set welcome page. Document sets make it faster and easier to work on groups of related documents, saving time and money.

We built document sets based on scenarios that we saw both internally at Microsoft and from our customers. For example on the Office team we organize the parts of the products we build into features and each feature has a team that works on it. These features have specifications, development plans, and test plans. Document sets make it easier to create the necessary documents and manage a collection of documents for a feature.

We also saw customers with similar scenarios, such as sales proposals that require presentations, spreadsheets, and sales contracts. Rather than manage each item individually, in these cases there may be metadata that should be shared and workflow processes that should happen on the collection of items. We expect partners and customers to take document sets and customize them for specific vertical scenarios to support important processes such as managing cases and research projects.

Now that I have given a quick intro into what document sets can be used for, allow me to give an overview of the main features of document sets.

Welcome Page

When you go to a document set you will notice that it isn’t your typical folder view. Document sets have a customizable welcome page. By default this page has a document set properties web part. From the document set settings page of the content type you can specify which document set columns show up in this web part. There is also a Document Set Contents web part which displays the documents that have been added to the Document Set.

This is an example of a non-customized document set welcome page with a few documents.

This is an example of a customized welcome page that has had the image changed and a note board added. The welcome page is shared by all document sets of a particular content type in a list so any changes will be reflected for all instances. This makes it fast and easy to make changes to the welcome page because the updates will be instantly available to existing document sets.

Allowed Content Types

You can select the content types that are available to the document set, allowing you to control the types of content that are available to be used inside the document set. 

Default Content

Documents can be specified to be automatically created when a new document set is created. Default documents can be specified, allowing you to control the templates people use for a document set. This saves the time of having to find and upload templates to get started with. Of course users can still upload their own documents to a document set as well.

Shared Columns

Document set columns can be shared to all the documents inside the document set. This will make the column read only so the value can only be changed by editing the properties of a document set. This saves users time because they only need to update metadata in one place and it will then be updated on all documents inside the document set. It also helps ensure that metadata is consistent. You can use shared columns to make sure all of the documents have certain metadata.

Send To

Send To locations that have been specified in Central Administration will be available to document sets so you can send them to a configured content organizer. You can also use workflow actions to send document sets to a content organizer. The content organizer is a new SharePoint 2010 feature for moving content based on metadata to folders, libraries, or other sites.

Customizable Ribbon

One of the major improvements with SharePoint 2010 is the ribbon interface that is similar to the ribbon interface used in the Office client applications. Document sets have their own ribbon to perform actions such as send to, delete, and capturing versions. This ribbon can also be customized to add new commands.

Versioning

Document sets have their own versioning that is used to capture a snapshot of checked in versions of documents and the properties of the document set.

Workflow

Document sets support workflows on a collection of documents. Several workflow actions specific to the document set are available in SharePoint Designer including capture a version and start an approval process.

Summary

Document sets are a great way to organize related documents for project based work. They provide a customizable and collaborative environment that you can use to meet the needs of multi document work products. They are also a central information architecture component that can be used to represent concepts such as research notebooks, sales proposals, and product specifications. Document sets make it easier to automatically provision templates, collaborate on a group of documents, and share information about documents (such as metadata properties).

Be sure to subscribe to the ECM blog RSS feed and keep reading the blog. I will be posting more blog posts about document sets where I will cover creating a custom document set content type and customizing the welcome page.

Quentin Christensen

Program Manager, Document and Records Management

In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 we released Information Management Policy. This allowed auditing and expiration on a per content type basis. With SharePoint Server 2010 retention flexibility has been greatly increased. There are now several retention actions that can be performed out of box and it is easy to trigger custom workflows. The biggest new feature is the ability to do location based retention (set retention by folder), which opens new options for hierarchical file plans. You can also do multi stage retention as well.

Configuring Policy

The Information Management Policy settings page can be accessed by going to the site content types gallery, selecting a content type, and clicking on the Information management policy settings link. On the settings page you can fill in an administrative description, this is what is displayed to administrators when configuring policies. A policy statement can also be displayed, this is what will be shown to end users for example when they open a Word document they will get an information bar. There are for categories of policy: retention, auditing, barcodes, and labels. Retention allows you to specify actions that occur after a certain date. Auditing gives you options to select of operations to items that will be tracked. Barcodes and labels can be used to track documents.

Retention Actions

The retention actions include:

· Move to recycle bin

· Permanently delete

· Transfer to another location – You can select from configured Send To locations that will send the document to a content organizer

· Start a workflow – select from available workflows that are associated with the content type (or list in the case of location based policy)

· Skip to next stage

· Declare record – this will mark the item a record using the new in place records feature. At the site collection level you can specify whether a record should be treated as a normal item, block delete, or block edit and delete. In order to use this action the In Place Records site collection feature must be activated.

· Delete previous drafts

· Delete all versions

In the events section you will notice that you can select columns, and there is a disabled option to set a custom retention formula. This option is available if a custom retention formula has been installed on the server. You can check out the article Creating a Custom Expiration Formula Based on Metadata in SharePoint Server for more information about creation a custom retention formula.

Content Type Based and Location Based Retention

With SharePoint Server 2010 you can configure content type or location based retention. Content type based retention lets you specify that all items of a particular content type will follow a retention schedule. To specify a retention stage go to the information management policy settings page, which can be accessed from the main settings page for a content type. From there you can click on the enable button for retention and add new stages. It is important to note that pages, blogs, and wikis are content types that can have policy as well as documents.

Retention can also be specified by library and folder. To do this navigate to the list you would like to configure retention for, go to the list settings page and then click the link for information management policy settings. By default items will follow content type based retention. To change the retention schedule source click the change source link. Now all items in this list will follow the retention schedule that is specified for this list, rather than whatever is specified for the content type. To the left of the screen there is a tree control that can be used to navigate the folders in the list. You can use this control to select different folders to specify a retention schedule for that particular folder and all folders beneath it.

Folders inherit location policy from their parent. At the list level I can set a retention schedule for all items to expire 5 years after created date. All items in the list will receive then expire after 5 years. For the Confidential folder I need to retain items for 7 years, so now any items inside the confidential folder (including any new folders) will now expire at 7 years.

You can also set multi stage retention schedules. Let’s say that after a document has not been modified for more than 90 days previous versions will not be needed, so to save space I want all previous drafts to be deleted (because each version takes is the full size of the document, 10 versions means 10 times the space may be taken up). Also I do not want documents cluttering up this library because it is a collaborative space. After 1 year documents are no longer needed, but they do need to be retained for 7 years due to legal compliance reasons. I can set a second stage to send all documents to a record center after 1 year.

SharePoint Server 2010 provides greatly improved capabilities and flexibility for retention of documents. A few of the major improvements include multi stage retention actions, more out of box retention actions, and location based retention. Also improvements with creating workflows with SharePoint Designer make it much easier to create custom workflows to create retention actions to solve your needs.

Quentin Christensen

Program Manager, Document and Records Management

In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 we released Information Management Policy. This allowed auditing and expiration on a per content type basis. With SharePoint Server 2010 retention flexibility has been greatly increased. There are now several retention actions that can be performed out of box and it is easy to trigger custom workflows. The biggest new feature is the ability to do location based retention (set retention by folder), which opens new options for hierarchical file plans. You can also do multi stage retention as well.

Configuring Policy

The Information Management Policy settings page can be accessed by going to the site content types gallery, selecting a content type, and clicking on the Information management policy settings link. On the settings page you can fill in an administrative description, this is what is displayed to administrators when configuring policies. A policy statement can also be displayed, this is what will be shown to end users for example when they open a Word document they will get an information bar. There are for categories of policy: retention, auditing, barcodes, and labels. Retention allows you to specify actions that occur after a certain date. Auditing gives you options to select of operations to items that will be tracked. Barcodes and labels can be used to track documents.

Retention Actions

The retention actions include:

· Move to recycle bin

· Permanently delete The co-authoring robot added this text. Please email CyberDog if you have questions.

· Transfer to another location – You can select from configured Send To locations that will send the document to a content organizer

· Start a workflow – select from available workflows that are associated with the content type (or list in the case of location based policy)

· Skip to next stage

· Declare record – this will mark the item a record using the new in place records feature. At the site collection level you can specify whether a record should be treated as a normal item, block delete, or block edit and delete. In order to use this action the In Place Records site collection feature must be activated.

· Delete previous drafts

· Delete all versions

In the events section you will notice that you can select columns, and there is a disabled option to set a custom retention formula. This option is available if a custom retention formula has been installed on the server. You can check out the article Creating a Custom Expiration Formula Based on Metadata in SharePoint Server for more information about creation a custom retention formula.

Content Type Based and Location Based Retention

With SharePoint Server 2010 you can configure content type or location based retention. Content type based retention lets you specify that all items of a particular content type will follow a retention schedule. To specify a retention stage go to the information management policy settings page, which can be accessed from the main settings page for a content type. From there you can click on the enable button for retention and add new stages. It is important to note that pages, blogs, and wikis are content types that can have policy as well as documents.

Retention can also be specified by library and folder. To do this navigate to the list you would like to configure retention for, go to the list settings page and then click the link for information management policy settings. By default items will follow content type based retention. To change the retention schedule source click the change source link. Now all items in this list will follow the retention schedule that is specified for this list, rather than whatever is specified for the content type. To the left of the screen there is a tree control that can be used to navigate the folders in the list. You can use this control to select different folders to specify a retention schedule for that particular folder and all folders beneath it.

Folders inherit location policy from their parent. At the list level I can set a retention schedule for all items to expire 5 years after created date. All items in the list will receive then expire after 5 years. For the Confidential folder I need to retain items for 7 years, so now any items inside the confidential folder (including any new folders) will now expire at 7 years.

You can also set multi stage retention schedules. Let’s say that after a document has not been modified for more than 90 days previous versions will not be needed, so to save space I want all previous drafts to be deleted (because each version takes is the full size of the document, 10 versions means 10 times the space may be taken up). Also I do not want documents cluttering up this library because it is a collaborative space. After 1 year documents are no longer needed, but they do need to be retained for 7 years due to legal compliance reasons. I can set a second stage to send all documents to a record center after 1 year.

SharePoint Server 2010 provides greatly improved capabilities and flexibility for retention of documents. A few of the major improvements include multi stage retention actions, more out of box retention actions, and location based retention. Also improvements with creating workflows with SharePoint Designer make it much easier to create custom workflows to create retention actions to solve your needs.

Quentin Christensen

Program Manager, Document and Records Management

SharePoint Server 2010 unleashes new features such as managed metadata and metadata navigation that make metadata even more important. But a big problem for many SharePoint projects is getting metadata onto documents. It is important to consider the tradeoff of metadata vs. user tax. As the number of metadata columns that must be filled in increases it becomes less likely that users will fill in metadata because it is that much additional work to go through and see which columns actually apply. If a large amount of required columns are used then user adoption may be slow because it is so taxing to upload content. In a very open and collaborative scenario this can be detrimental. But as the value of the content and effort to create that content increases, it becomes more likely that users will take the time to fill in the appropriate fields, especially when this operation is not frequent.

For any SharePoint project you should carefully consider what metadata will be needed to perform required operations and for users to find content. Evaluate how long it will take users to fill in that metadata, and evaluate the user impact. If lots of metadata is required but end users do not adopt the system because the overhead for creating content is high it will be difficult to have a successful implementation.

Metadata defaults help with this problem because you can automatically fill in metadata for users. If a particular field will have the same value 50% or more of the time then you should specify a metadata default to help users fill in forms faster. Metadata defaults can be specified for each column at the site level, list level, and folder level. Metadata defaults inherit from each other and the child default will always override. For example if a default is set on a folder and there are defaults for the list and the site column, the default for the folder will be applied. If there are defaults for a column and a list, but no default for a folder then when an item is added to that folder it will get the list default. When users create or upload a new item the metadata default will be applied and be displayed in the edit properties form. The user can then change the property as needed. By planning for and setting metadata defaults early it will be easier to evaluate what the metadata defaults should be and how they can be used to help make it easier to get metadata applied to items.

Metadata defaults are supported on the following column types:

· Single Line of Text

· Choice

· Number

· Currency

· Date and Time

· Yes/no

· Managed Metadata

Setting metadata defaults when editing columns:

When creating or editing a column at the site or list level there is a field to specify a default value. You can specify defaults at the site level, and then override them at the list level.

Setting metadata defaults with the tree control: 

In libraries you can use a tree control to set metadata defaults for the library and per folder. To do this go to library settings and click on the link “Column default value settings”. This will give you a tree control that you can use to navigate the folders in the library. You can set defaults at the root of the library as well as for each individual folder. Folders will inherit default values unless you specify a particular default value for the child folder.

Metadata defaults are a great way to help place metadata on columns. You can even use it to apply defaults on hidden columns so users never even have the option to edit the field, but they can use the metadata to navigate and retrieve content.

Quentin Christensen

Program Manager, Document and Records Management