The 4th post about organizing documents in SharePoint will cover the functionality of document sets in a SharePoint document library. Main focus will be the feature to get some metadata from the document set copied automatically to the document which is uploaded to the document set.
Post serie overview:
Part I – Best Practice I: Organize documents in SharePoint
Part II – Best Practice II: Organize documents in SharePoint
Part III – Best Practice III: Organize documents in SharePoint
Part IV -Best Practice IV: Document Sets in SharePoint
There are a plenty of posts and descriptions what document sets are, where they come from and what they can do for you. So i won’t reinvent the wheel. This post is a focus on the configuration of the document set. If you upload a document to the document set, it should take over certain metadata from the set.
Be prepared
What you should have in your library or in your site: I created a content type “Customer” inheriting from type document set for which i already created the site columns “Customers Name”, “Customers ID” and “Customer Contact”. After that i created a content type “Contract” inheriting from type document. This content type i add the site columns which i also created for the “Customer” Content type. I also created the site columns “Contract Status”, “KeyAccount”, “DueDate” and “ContractID” and added those the content type.
After that i created the document library and add these two content types to the library.
Configure the document set
Now we configure the document set to get the desired result. Go to the library into library settings and click on the content type “Customer” we created. Now click on Document Set Settings and you will see this page:
In the area “Shared Columns” you can choose the columns which should be shared which is exactly what i talked about in the beginning. We choose all of them:
Now it should already work: if you upload a document from type contract to the document set, it should take automatically the values Customers Contact, CustomersID and what else you prepared.
So it is really easy to provide standardized metadata in document set without type them in again and again. The user only needs to fill the special metadata for the contract but not for the customer again.
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