A Managed Document Center – Part II

In my previous post I explained the approach I will take to respond to a very interesting request about configured an automatically managed document center. I divided the job in the following steps:

1. Create the necessary Term Sets in the Term Store.
2. Create a new site using the Document Center template.
3. Enable and set up the Content Organizer.
4. Create a site Content Type using Document as Parent Content Type.
5. Edit the default Documents library with the columns and views needed.
6. Create a workflow to rename the documents.
7. Save the Documents library as template and create a new document library for each facility.
8. Create Content Organizing rules to route the documents to his final location.
9. Redirect the default “Upload a Document” button to the Drop Off Library.

You can check more about the request and how the first step in this link.

In this post I will cover steps 2 to 5. Let's get started.

2. Create a new site using the Document Center template

This step is very straightforward and I am sure more than one has already created a site. On the site where you want to create the subsite, click on All Site Content. On the All Site Content page, click on Create. On the left side, under Filter By, select Site and the click on the Document Center template. Type a name for the document center, a URL, and then click on Create.

3. Enable and set up the Content Organizer

The Content Organizer is a feature of the SharePoint sites that creates rules based on metadata to move content to the correct library or folder.

To enable the Content Organizer, click on the Site Actions menu of the newly created document center, and click on Site Settings. Under Site Actions, click on Manage site features.

 The Content Organizer is the first option in the Site Features page. Click on its Activate button. Wait until the Active labels shows up next to it.

 4. Create a site Content Type using Document as Parent Content Type

Since each document that we are going to upload to this document center needs to be associated with the metadata we created in the previous post, we are going to create a site content type that inherits from the document type.

Click on the Site Actions menu of the document site and click on Site Settings. Under Galleries, click on Site content types.

On the Site Content Types, click on the Create button. Type “Managed Document” as the name of the content type. Select Document Content Type on the Select parent content type from drop down list, and Document as Parent Content Type. Click OK when done.

After clicking ok, the Set Content Type Information page appears. Is in this page when we can set up the columns with the metadata that our content type will have. To do this, at the bottom of the screen, click on Add from new site column. Type “Facility” on the column name and select Managed Metadata for the column type. On the Term Set Settings section, expand the taxonomy root and expand also the Document Center group; then click on the Facility term set. Also, on the Allow Fill-in section select Yes.  Leave the rest of the parameters with their default values.

Repeat he same process to create a managed metadata column for Document Type and Product. At the end you should have a content type similar to this picture:

As a separate note, while in the Site Content Type Information page, if you click on Information management policy settings you will see a series of option to define auditing, compliance and other settings. I will write later in a future post about all these policy settings.

5. Edit the default Documents library with the columns and views needed

When we created the site using the Document Center template, SharePoint will create a document library named “Documents”. Click on its name located in the navigation bar at the left of the screen. Once in the Documents library, look for the Library Settings icon in the ribbon located in the Library tab.

First, make sure the management of content types is allowed in the site. Click in Advanced Settings and verify that Allow management of content types? is set to Yes.

Next, under Content Types click Add from existing content types. Select “Managed Document” and add it to the list on the right. Click OK when done. Remove the current document types clicking on their names and then clicking on Delete this content type link. At the end, the Managed Document should be the only document type associated with this library.

In order to view the documents attributes, edit the All Documents view and add the products and document type columns. You could also set up grouping.

Finally, in order to provide a easy way to filtering, let’s enable the navigation hierarchies. Within the Document Library Settings page, click on Metadata navigation settings. On the Configure Navigation Hierarchies section, remove Folders and add Document Type and Products. Click OK when done.

Our model library is now ready, let’s test it uploading a document from the Upload a Document button in the home page of the document center. Immediately the document has been uploaded, it ask to complete the metadata requested:

The next step will be to create a workflow to rename automatically the documents. I will cover it on my next post. Keep posted!