An introduction to Document Sets…

By blurg64

Over the next few posts, I will be looking at a number of features in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged by a project manager or project team to make their lives easier.

Document Set Icon The first such feature I want to highlight are ‘Document Sets’. Document sets are a relatively simple concept, allowing the user to create a set of documents that can be treated as one, allowing metadata or workflows to be assigned against the set and thus consistently across each part within the document set.

An example of where you might use a document set would be for a weekly status report, each week the project manager creates a textual status report and an associated financial spreadsheet that contains the financial history of the project. Each are separate documents, but need to be read in the context of each other. By placing them in a document set, you can ensure the versioning is kept in sync, they automatically share common metadata and when a new status report document set is created, the default documents in the set are created automatically.

Document Set with content

By default, Document Sets are not turned on in either the Project Server Project Sites, nor in a normal team site document library, but switching them on is really simple.

In Site Collection Admin, choose to administer the Site Collection Features and activate the Document Set Feature

Document Set Site Feature

Once activated in the site collection, it is necessary to turn it on in the document library. This is achieved by choosing to allow management of content types within the library:

Allow management of content type

Choose to Add the Document Set content type and your done.

Add Document Set

Once added, choose to edit the content type, and specifically the ‘Document Set Settings’ in the content type setting screen.

Document Set Config

All that remains now is to configure which content types the Document set should allow, and the default documents in the set (very much like setting up a normal content type).Setup content

There you have it, once you have saved the above, the document set will be configured for that library and ready to use when you next do you status reporting.