Managing Document Sets
Often, you may want a number of related documents to be treated as one entity, corresponding to a work product in your organization’s business process. For example, an expense report submitted by an employee might include a number of bills/receipts, travel tickets or boarding passes, and other supporting documents. Document sets allow all these documents to be grouped together thus facilitating the entire set of documents to participate in the business process as a single entity.
In SharePoint, document sets are implemented as content type. Hence the traditional concepts applicable to a content type (workflows, versioning, and so on) apply to a document set as well.
Try It Yourself: Create a Document Set
1. Activate the site collection level feature called Document Sets.
2. Set the Allow Management of Content Types option to Yes for a particular library. You can find this option on the Advanced Settings page while configuring document library settings, as illustrated in Figure 12.5.
Figure 12.5. Enabling management of content types
3. Add the Document Set content type as an allowed content type for the document library by navigating to the Add from Existing Site Content Types link in the document library settings.
4. Click the New Document button, and you see the option to create a document set.
5. Create the new document set and specify a name and description for it. Once the document set is created, you are taken to a welcome page that you can use to manage the content in the document set.
If your library contains both documents and document sets, you can identify the document sets with their unique folder icon as shown in Figure 12.6.
Figure 12.6. Identifying the document sets
Now examine the properties of your newly created document set, as illustrated in Figure 12.7.
Figure 12.7. Document sets too are assigned document IDs.
Interestingly, document sets too are assigned document IDs, and clicking on the document ID or navigating to http://YourSiteCollection/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=W6NPTDNWAMTW-5-3 takes you to the document set’s welcome page.
Try It Yourself: Configure a Document Set
1. Navigate to Site Settings, Site Content Types (under Galleries).
2. Select the Document Set content type. This should give you a screen similar to Figure 12.8.
Figure 12.8. Configuring the Document Set content type
3. To configure allowed content types under a document set, click Document Set Settings and then choose the content types you want to allow under the document set.
4. You can also choose to prepopulate a newly created document set with default content. For this, on the Document Set Settings screen, in the Default Content section, select a content type for which you want to upload default content and click the Browse button to locate and upload the same.
5. If you want certain columns to be shared among each of the content types in the document set, you can do the required configuration using the Share Columns section on the Document Set Settings screen. Shared columns can be edited only at the document set level and are read-only at the individual document level.
6. You can also customize the welcome page for the document set. You can select the columns to be displayed on the welcome page or customize it using your web-browser and manipulate web parts on the welcome page. You can also use SharePoint Designer to perform more advanced customizations.