Advanced Settings Examined from a Library Design Standpoint

The Advanced Settings link on the Document Library Settings page reveals additional tools of interest to the architect or administrator. In fact, these settings are so fundamental to the overall functionality of the document library that time should be spent reviewing these options and the pros and cons to the organization during the design and testing phases.

For example, the decision of whether to Allow Management of Content Types can have wide-reaching impact on the complexity of the environment and amount of training required for users and administrators of the libraries. The ability to edit the template used by the document library may lead the architects to choose to create document libraries dedicated to the management of a single type of document (for example, resumes) and configure the template accordingly. In addition, the architects may decide that content from certain document libraries should not be able to be synced to Outlook clients or to the SharePoint Workspace product. All of these settings are accessed via the Advanced Settings link. A more detailed summary of these options is as follows:

• Allow Management of Content Types— The options are Yes or No. Content types can be an extremely powerful tool for more sophisticated document management in organizations that have invested time in creating a taxonomy for managing resources in SharePoint. Content types are discussed more in Chapter 22.

• Provide a Template URL— This option will be grayed out if Allow Management of Content Types is set to Yes because in that case, the templates are managed with each content type. If content types are not enabled for the library, the administrator can click the Edit Template link to open the document in the appropriate application (such as Word) and then edit the template. This is an easy way for the library administrator to customize the template document for the library and is most useful if the document library has been created for a specific purpose, such as containing a specific type of document (for example, proposals, resumes, diagrams, spreadsheets, or other standard Microsoft document types).

• Determine Open Behavior for Browser-Enabled Documents— The options are to Open in the Client Application, Open in the Browser, or Use the Server Default (Open in the Browser).

• Define a Custom Send to Destination— This location will be visible if a user selects a document and then clicks the Send To icon in the Documents tab of the Ribbon, or accesses the drop-down menu for an item in the document library and clicks the Send To submenu. By inputting a URL of a different document library, the library administrator makes it easy for users to send documents to a specific location. Although this feature isn’t commonly used, it can encourage users to make a copy of the document in another document library and can prompt the author to send out updates when the document is checked in and create an alert on the source document.

• Make New Folder Command Available— The library administrator should decide whether to allow the use of folders within the document library, a topic discussed in detail in Chapter 19, in the section titled “Pros and Cons of the New Folder Tool.”

• Allow Items from This Document Library to Appear in Search Results— Bearing in mind that all SharePoint search results are security trimmed, so only users with permissions to at least view the document will see its contents appear in searches, there are still rare situations where the contents of a document library should not appear in search results. For example, a document library may be created for brainstorming, but the contents of that document library should be moved to another document library (possibly by using a custom send to destination) before being available via the search tool. This helps ensure that the results of searches are as relevant as possible.

• Allow Items from This Document Library to be Downloaded to Offline Clients— This applies both to using SharePoint Workspace and syncing with the Outlook client. If this option is enabled, users will receive errors if they try and synchronize to Outlook or use SharePoint Workspace to sync content. The error messages are very clear. For example, the error from the Resolve tab in SharePoint Workspace states, “Your administrator has prevented this list from being taken offline.” Note that content can still be Exported to Excel.

• Should This Library Be a Site Assets Library— If Yes is checked, this library will be presented as the default location in the drop-down list for storing images or other files that users upload to their wiki pages. This does not convert the library into an assets library, and does not add any content types to the library.

• Allow Items in This Document Library to Be Edited Using the Datasheet— The datasheet option was covered in more detail in Chapter 19, in the section titled “Interacting with Lists Using the Datasheet View,” and this setting allows the administrator to make the datasheet view available or not. Although the datasheet view can be a time saver, it can also facilitate massive changes to metadata and might not be recommended for new users. Alternatively, the Datasheet view can be enabled initially when documents are uploaded and tagged with metadata, but then turned off once that process is complete.

• Launch Forms in a Dialog— Setting this to No will cause the whole page to change instead of the AJAX form to load. For example, if this is set to No, when a user clicks Upload Document, the whole page changes to the upload.aspx page, rather than the AJAX form loading and the background dimming. This may be more comfortable to users familiar with previous versions of SharePoint and should be considered for testing.