Sharepoint Document Management
Sharepoint Document Management centers around the storage and organisation of documents. Multiple features within Sharepoint 2010, MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 assist with the management of work-in-progress documentation, document creation and collaboration and sharing in an organisation.
Most organisations’ document management systems employ the typical “fileshare” method where content may exist in a decentralized environment, stretched across multiple disk drives. Whilst this may work for organisations with vary structured data heirachies or small amounts data, the majority of fileshares become an organised mess where content is difficult to find, unstructured and is time-consuming to access. Sharepoint Document Management features help alleviate this problem.
Sharepoint stores documents in within “Document Libraries”. These document libraries may be seen as merely a windows folder with a number documents. Whilst your documents may be viewed in this form, document libraries will provide you with a rich set of functionality that an ordinary fileshare may never imitate.
Document Management Metadata
The most valuable business information and content is stored within the document. When this information is stored in the document, it is difficult to use, search, filter or group information. Let us give you an example:
The image above shows a typical fileshare directory with a number of file properties. In Sharepoint, we refer to that as metadata. The metadata is limited in the fileshare structure since you may use the standard windows properties assigned to any one document. The weakness here is that the metadata of any document is not organisation specific, the size or date modified does not relate to any specific organisational data and therefore is useless to search, filter or group documents with.
Metadata – Organisational specific data: How does that help?
Take the document library shown below. A really simple example of a couple of quote related documents:
Whilst it is still a list of documents, the capability and functionality around these documents suddenly increased significantly. Notice we still have the standard pieces of metadata like “Modified”. However we have a few extra pieces of information on the documents, for example, “Doc Status”. Although this demonstrates a very simple example, the concept is still the same. We can append any types of metadata to the documents to describe our documents a little better. Here a document status may either be in “Final” or “Draft” status. A “rating” metadata example has been added to show off an interactive type of metadata. Metadata can be any type of business data which is relative to your organisation.
So why do we need Sharepoint Document Management Metadata and how does it help my organisation’s document management strategy?
Metadata is an extremely powerful feature which allows you to search, filter and group your documents in a logical format. Take the example below:
As you can see, the documents have now been grouped by quote number, automatically making it easier to find all quote documents relating to that particular quote.
Eliminate complex fileshare structures: Use Sharepoint Metadata
A new employee walks into your organisation. He/she will be working with the above mentioned system. Companies who aren’t using Sharepoint Document Management features will spend time explaining a complex file structure to the new employee. New Quotes may go into a file structure which has folders broken down by year, month and the creator of the particular document. For example:
–> 2008
—–> January ——->Joe Soap
——->Bob Soap
——->Sue Soap
—–> February
Sharepoint Document Management Metadata allows an easier path to the employee’s understanding of the quote document management structure. Once a quote is created, he/she will be prompted to fill in the necessary metadata, where the metadata may or may not be made mandatory. An example shows this below:
The example shows the properties or metadata of the document. The new employee is not prompted on where in the file structure to save the document, but rather the important business information around that document.
Locating Sharepoint Documents
The use of document metadata doesnt stop there. Whilst the example of the employee trying to find the quotes folder in the complex file structure still holds true for Sharepoint. The question still might beg:
Where do i find this “Quotes Document Library”?
The document metadata might be used in the document search process. An example of this is shown below:
In the above example the search results can optionally be broken down by language, the language metadata column which is attached to the document library searched in this example. Other options include searching for documents by metadata. For example: Show me all documents where Language is German. Or in our example above; Show me all documents where “Doc Status” is Final. These elements make searching sharepoint documents much easier.
Different Views of the same data
Document Metadata also helps with creating views. The example showing the quotes grouped by quote number is an example of this. Document Library Views can be used to sort, filter and group documents thus giving your users a view of only the data that is relevant. This concept extends to creating personal views of the data. Consider the following example:
The example shows that we can create views on any data or documentation within any document library or list, in this example, show only the documents which have “Doc Status” set to Final and “Modified By” the user im currently logged in with. The information targetting feature that this allows once again helps manipulate our information into more mangeable silos.
