Overview

  • Document sets are a group of related documents that can be packaged together and then managed as a single entity. [1]
  • Think zip or compressed folder but they are not actually compressed and not considered a folder.
  • Used to manage multi-document work products.  For example, an RFP or RFP Response might be composed of many documents, like spreadsheets, appendices, etc…  You might want to group these together as one entity rather than in a folder.
  • SharePoint allows you to:
  1. Automatically create a set of default documents when a specific document set is created.  For example, if your organization has default templates for an RFP composition, you can have these automatically within your document set.
  2. Define the content types allowed within your document set (i.e. invoices, expense forms, etc…)
  3. Synchronization of meta-data for all documents within your document set
  4. Allow workflows for the document set itself rather than all the individual documents within the document set (i.e. approve all of these documents)
  5. Have and customize a welcome page for your document set (i.e. so you can describe the templates in your document set or even describe the document set purpose
  6. Have versioning on the entire Document Set!  This is huge, you can roll back and view previous version of document sets

Activated via a Site Collection Feature under Site Actions –> Site Settings –> Site Collection Features:

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Or activated by PowerShell via: Enable-SPFeature –id “DocumentSet” -url “<site collection url>”

Upon activation, you create a new content type based upon the Parent Document Set content type and add that content type to your library.

Some things to be aware of:

  • You cannot group by content types on views in document sets
  • Folders and metadata navigation are not supported

 

The complete list of this series can be seen by the following links:

1. Introduction
2. Document IDs
3. Managed Metadata Service (Term Store)
4. In-Place Records Declarations
5. Site Collection Auditing
6. Content Organizer
7. Compliance Details
8. Hold and eDiscovery
9. Content Type Publishing Hubs
10. Multi-Level Retention
11. Virtual folders and metadata based navigation
12. Scaling
13. Send To…
14. Document Sets

 

[1] http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/introduction-to-document-sets-HA101782466.aspx

 

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