In my previous posting about the many enhancements to workflow created in SharePoint Designer 2010, I mentioned that approval processes can be applied to both documents and document sets. Seeing how the latter case is a new feature in SharePoint 2010, I thought it might be a good idea to at least explain the basic principles of document sets.
The Basics
As the name implies, a document set represents a collection of closely related documents. In SharePoint 2010, document set functionality is a Site Collection feature that must first be enabled. Here, I’m enabling it and the Document ID Service feature.
After this is done, the Document Set content type is enabled and can be created like any other traditional content type.
After this is done, you can assign other content types to be part of the document set. In this example, my “Proposal” document set will contain both a Statement of Work and Project Estimation Sheet as members. To add them, document set content types have a special “Document set settings” option.
From there, you can add other content types to be included in the set and (optionally) set them to be populated within a new set by default.
If you add supplemental Site Columns to your document set, you can include them in the “welcome page” of the set. As the description states, the data contained within these columns are synchronized with all documents within the set. In addition, components of the document set Welcome Page can be customized with web parts and the like. At the time of this writing, this feature does not appear to be implemented yet. At least not without cracking open SharePoint Designer 2010.
Adding the document set to a document library is handled in the same manner as adding a regular content type. However, when users go to create a new document in the library, they see a slightly different icon.
Then, users are prompted to enter required metadata about the set.
Once this is done, voila! The set appears and documents are pre-provisioned. Very cool.
And since I had configured the Document ID feature, the document set and all subordinate documents are assigned a unique number by the Document ID service.
Approval Process
So what about the approval process? Well, this can be done in SPD 2010 using the following action:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the rest of the process to work from here. I’ll be looking at this more when the full beta comes out and will be interested to see how a streamlined, easy-to-use process can be developed to handle approval for document sets like this.
Conclusion
Document Sets are just one of many new document management features that SharePoint 2010 is bringing to the table. And don’t think this is just a new type of folder. The ability to synchronize metadata between documents and relate them to each other in this way goes far beyond that concept. This mirrors the real world well. I’ve been on a couple of projects where customers had business processes that involve not just one, but several tightly-coupled documents that needed to be handled synchronously. I think the Document Set feature holds quite a lot of promise.
