SharePoint Content Management and Content Organizer

It is important to plan the structure and features of a site before starting to implement or add content.  It can be very difficult to undo the work, not t mention the habits learned if users start throwing stuff up on SharePoint without a structure in place.

This is the sample scenario we will use throughout the course. 

With the needs analysis complete, the implementation plan makes a lot more sense.  Remember, it's important to get the structure established before users start creating or uploading content.

There are several site templates to choose from when creating sub-sites. 

List templates not only include the associated columns, they also have built-in views and content types, as well as back-end features to support their intended use.

Create a separate document library for each department in the company.  This level of division will be more relevant when Content Organizer is enabled.

Create a subfolder in each document library, then turn off the ability to create new subfolders.  Turn on major versioning for the Finance doclib, and Content Approval for the Marketing doclib.

Custom columns in document libraries are always preferable to folders for truly effective organization of content.  Using Site Columns allows administrators to create and maintain columns in one place, but reuse the same columns throughout the site collection.

Once the site columns have been created, they can be added to lists and libraries.

Use the built-in collumns and the newly added site columns to fill out the lists' New Item form to create calendar events, announcements, and discussions for each department.

Download and extract the attached zip file, which contains sample files for the various departments.  Upload the files to the correct department, tagging it with appropriate values in the site columns.

A "view" in SharePoint is a set of columns in a certain order, along with sorting, filtering, grouping, as well as some style elements.  Every list and library has at least one view that is the default view for that app.

Views can be set up to show different columns from the list, for different purposes. 

It's not always useful to have every column in every view.  Remove some that would otherwise take up screen real estate without adding any value to the users.

There are 3 page constructs in SharePoint, all of which support the use of Web Parts.  Web Parts are windows of visibility and functionality into contents that exist elsewhere on a site. 

Connect a filter web part to several document library web parts, each of which uses a custom view that disregards folders.  The filter web part will allow users to select a specific property value to pass to the document library web parts as a filter.

Site Pages are the new "modern" type of page in SharePoint.  They are known as responsive, meaning they will adjust to the type of device (desktop versus tablet versus smart phone) used to browse to the page.

Use SharePoint various methods for providing hyperlinks to direct the users to the custom pages created for their use.

Quick Launch (or Current Navigation) is a set of hyperlinks that are managed at the site settings level and are available on any page throughout the site.  Top Link Bar (or Global Navigation) is also centrally managed and can be inherited downward by child sites.

Promoted Links is a special list that can be added to sites.  It allows administrators to create a set of "tiles", which direct users to specific URLs when they're clicked on.  Create the tiles, then add the Promoted Links web part to any page you want to show this type of navigation.

Wiki pages within the same library have a shortcut method for creating links among them.  It is also possible to create a link to a page that hasn't been created yet.

Create a custom content type using a built-in document content type, but add custom site columns to the new content type's properties.

Download and extract the attached zip file, containing the Word and Excel templates the company wants to use.  Create a custom content type, using each file as the template file.

Enable Content Type Management on document libraries.  Add new Content Types to appropriate document libraries.

Use the newly deployed content types to create new documents in the various document libraries (in the appropriate folder, where necessary).

Content Organizer rules consist of a set of matching criteria and a target destination.  Matching criteria can be content type and/or specific values assigned to content type properties.  As a general principle, set rules that have more specific criteria to a higher priority on the list of rules.

This tutorial uses an unrelated document library to teach the operation of Content Organizer from start to finish.  Create the test files in the Drop-Off library, not in the new document library.  The Content Organizer will route them to the correct document library.

Create a rule that routes each department's Company Document content type to that department's document library.

Notice that the Content Type gets added to the Drop-Off library's list of content types.  This is because there is a rule that uses that content type, so the Drop-Off library has to be able to present it for tagging.

Create more specific rules (and give them higher priority) for each department's custom content type.  Notice that each content type gets added to the Drop-Off library.  Be aware that the content type must be added to the destination library in order to create the rule.  This prevents someone from creating an erroneous rule.

Experiment with the two methods for Content Organizer to handle duplicate file names in the same destination.

Change the user experience from modern to classic, either at the site level or at the individual document library level.