SharePoint Tip of the Month

June 2010: SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Capabilities

SharePoint 2010 (“The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Internet”) segments functionality into six capabilities: Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and Composites. The focus of this month’s tip is Content. There is no way to describe all the new functionality offered in SharePoint 2010 in regards to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) within these couple of paragraphs, however this tip will provide a high level overview of several of the new features, along with some scenarios in which your organization might be able to put these capabilities to work.

Content Type Syndication – In MOSS 2007, Content Types are defined and managed at the Site Collection level and cannot be used across Site Collections without recreating (introducing the possibility of manual errors) or deploying the Content Type as a feature through code (requiring programming skills). SharePoint 2010 provides the concept of Content Type Syndication which allows the definition of a Content Publishing Hub which publishes Content Types to consumers that subscribe to the Content Hub.

• What can SharePoint 2010 do for you?
• Content Types can now be maintained and updated in a single centralized location and be consistently updated across the enterprise (Content Types are “published” from a “normal” Site Content Type Gallery):
• A Controlled Document which is utilized by many Departments has a new column added. Each Department has its own Site Collection for security purposes. The source Controlled Document can be updated and the update will be consumed by each of the subscribing Departments.
• A new governance policy could be put in place that all Blog entries expire after 24 months by just updating a single Content Type and then having this published.

Document Sets – Document Sets allow a user to treat what previously might have been a heterogeneous collection of Document Types as a single collection, and share Metadata, Version History, Workflow and a Customizable Welcome page for the Document Set.

• What can SharePoint 2010 do for you?
• Let’s say that your organization lands a contract for a project with a new customer. For each customer project, your company creates a PowerPoint Kickoff Presentation, a Microsoft Word Contract, a Microsoft Project Project Plan, and an Excel Spreadsheet for budgeting numbers
• The PowerPoint, Word Document, Project Plan and Excel Worksheet documents can all be created as a Document Set.
• The Document Set (all the documents in the set) can go through a single approval process, rather than each of the documents having to go through their own individual approval workflows.
• The Document Set can be tagged with metadata (e.g. customer, project, etc.) at the Document Set level, rather than each of the individual documents being tagged.
• The Document Set can share the expiration policy (e.g. archive all documents 6 months after the Project Completion date).

Managed Metadata – Managed Metadata allows an organization to define Terms and Term Sets. A Term is a word or a phrase that can be associated with an item (list or document) in SharePoint. A Term Set is a collection of related Terms. SharePoint 2010 introduces a new column type named managed metadata. When you create a managed metadata column, you specify the Term Set from which the column's values must come.

• What can SharePoint 2010 do for you?
• More consistent use of Terms and better search results
• Here are some of the benefits received from Managed Metadata
• Type-ahead – as users type values, the Terms that match the characters entered are presented to the user.
• Synonyms – If the user enters IT, the system can present Information Technology. Multiple synonyms can be added for each Term.
• Multilingual User Interface (MUI) – Once an enterprise creates a Term Set, translated values for multiple languages can be entered for each corresponding Term.
• Tree Picker / Metadata Navigator – The Terms are presented/maintained in a hierarchical tree view control, which allows the maintenance of the Term Sets, as well as can be utilized for navigating documents from the user interface.

Term Sets, Terms, and Managed Metadata can be global throughout the organization (again crossing site collection boundaries). Most likely candidates for Terms and Term sets are existing lookup lists, choice fields and any fields that users want to use to sort or filter items. SharePoint 2010 provides the ability to have a very open system (e.g., allow users to add Terms to Term Sets) or a tightly-managed system (e.g. require that users only use pre-defined terms, and have a process for requesting new Terms) or anything in between.

This month’s tip contributed By Mark Henderson, Abel Solutions Senior SharePoint Consultant.