Managing Documents in SharePoint, the intelligent way!!

Document Management in SharePoint is a cumbersome task that often leaves IT administrators scratching their head with files & folders. Scanning, uploading and integrating content to SharePoint is just not enough. To quickly access the content that your employees, individuals or managers need, you want much more than a simple, document storing SharePoint application. What can be more gratifying than having a single manageable interface that can help you secure, manage and share business critical SharePoint information?

You might wonder how managing information in the right way can help your organization succeed in meeting both long-term and short-term goals associated with a project. So let’s take an example to introduce you with the criticality of managing information intelligently and efficiently.

The Scenario – Suppose you’re an enterprise running thousands of projects quarterly. Your IT administrator organizes all the files by Year (hierarchically via name of the year like 2006, 2007) on a shared drive that is accessible to other employees and members within the network. Each Year Folder has separate sub-folders with Names of Clients that you’ve worked for during that particular year (like Client A, Client B). And each Client folder is again subdivided into different folders with Names of Projects completed for a particular client (like Project D, Project E etc.) Finally each Project folder contain files in the form of documents that constitute a particular project (like Project Plan, Project Presentations etc.). Now, let’s say you want to check out all project plans made for client C within 10 minutes. How would you proceed? Is it possible to peep into thousands of folders at once and search the file in every folder that is displayed in front of your screen? Wouldn’t you panic in case you’re missing on a deadline?

Now, that’s where the role of Document Management in SharePoint comes into picture. With advanced features like check in and check out, permissions policies and version control management, latest versions of SharePoint has led it emerge as a successful enterprise management software across the globe.

So here, in this blog, I’m going to discuss some of the best techniques that will help you store documents in SharePoint intelligently and effectively!!

1. Folders & Document Sets

You all know what a folder is!! So, let me introduce you with the concept of a document set. Document sets are basically the components similar to folders that allow users to collaborate on interrelated documents without requiring to create a new document library or site.

Now while storing documents in SharePoint, the trick is to go with Folders in case you need a hierarchy. If you want to use the extra capabilities of Document Sets like usability studies, knowledge management repositories, contracts and project documents; you must prefer to go further with a Document set only.

2. Metadata Management : Best practices

Managed Metadata is basically a centrally managed collection of items where hierarchical terms that you can define and use as attributes are stored. Metadata is widely used as it refines search results in a better way and you can consistently use terminologies to search anything dynamically in a fast and easy way. Besides this, it allows you to have greater control over documents with features like sorting, filtering, grouping and generating custom views. One of the best things about Metadata management is – it can be imported even from a CSV file and everything can also be managed out of context.

Though you’ve all the additional features, there are some practices that must be followed by businesses relying on metadata management. First and foremost, you need to be a keen thinker while defining terms for your business. You need to plan everything in a hierarchical way while also being careful about legal requirements. To create your own metadata in SharePoint, first make new columns with properties and then proceed further. Remember that the success of metadata depends on two core components – first one is column and another one is a View.

3. Create Top-level Content Types to Organize Information

You can also organize your documents via creating content types. These content types can be created on the top level of site collection if you don’t have any specific business requirements. The best part about using content types is that they can be managed together and can be used as the parent of other content types. Also, you can create groups of content types instead of the default custom content types and can also define your own “root” content type.

4. Content Organizing Rules

When you have clear organizing goals, you can turn on the Content Organizer feature and use content organizing rules to create an excellent Search architecture with search based navigation.

In the target libraries also you can implement the content types quickly and easily.

Last but not the least, you can use third party tools to make document management simpler and faster. It’s not uncommon that IT administrators today are in dire need of sophisticated tools that can let them manage their files and folders quickly. With new features like Co-authoring and mobile integration, SharePoint is perceived as the best bet to manage information in a hierarchical manner.