In a typical project in which documents are
being produced frequently to accomplish one task, you may have not a
single document, but instead a set of documents that need to be treated
as one. This is where document sets come into the picture. A document set
is implemented as a site collection feature. Activating it gives you a
special content type that allows you to group together multiple
documents as a "set of documents."
This gives you many interesting new options. For
instance, a document set can have its own welcome page that can tell
users what the specific document set is all about. Because document
sets are implemented as a content type, they get everything that a
content type gets: versioning, workflows, policies, and so on. Only
this time around, the entire document "set" (i.e. multiple documents
together) can participate in the business processes defined on the
document set. Let's see how this works.
To use document sets, activate the site collection
level feature called Document Sets. Then in a document library, allow
management of content types and add Document Set as an allowed content
type. This can be seen in Figure 1.
With this new content type added to the document
library, you will be able to create a new document set from the New
button under the Documents ribbon. Creating a new document set will
simply ask you for a name and description. In the welcome page, you can
begin to add new documents in the document set (see Figure 2).
The welcome page is customizable to anything you
want. But for now, click the View All Properties link. You should see a
popup shown in Figure 3.
As you can tell, everything that you are used to
seeing at a document level is now available at a document set level.
Interestingly, the document set participates in the document ID
numbering as well. This truly lets you treat a set of documents as one
entity.
It is important to realize, however, that a document
set is nothing but just another content type. This means all the
facilities that are applicable to a content type are also applicable to
document set. Let's examine this in further detail. Because you have a
content type called Document Set in your site collection already,
create a new content type called My Document Set
and have it inherit from the Document Set content type. Now visit the
content type management page for this new My Document Set content type
that you created. You will see that just like any other content type
you have all the facilities, but you have a new link called Document
Set settings. This can be seen in Figure 4.
Clicking Documents Set settings allows you to customize a number of things about the My Document Set content type:
Under the Allowed Content type section, you can pick and choose the content types that are allowed inside this document set.
Under
the Default Content section, you can choose to prepopulate this
document set to include certain specific items. Not only that; you can
also choose to specify those default items as certain associated
content types. For instance, a document set called Client Interaction
may by default include a company overview, welcome letter, and proposal
outline.
Under Shared Columns, you can
choose to synchronize the value of a column from the document set onto
all the constituent documents.
Under the
Welcome Page Columns section, you can choose to show all columns from
the documents that will appear on the welcome page.
Under
the Welcome Page section, you can choose to customize the welcome page
of the documents set. You would note that the welcome page for the My
documents at content type lives at http://sp2010/_cts/My%20Document%20Set/docsethomepage.aspx.
"_cts" is a special folder in any site collection that contains all the
files necessary to support a content type. You can choose to edit the
welcome page right through the browser because this is just a WebPart
page. But you also have the option of performing serious customizations
through SharePoint Designer or even Visual Studio.
