Document Sets Compared to Folders as Organizational Tools in Document Libraries

Document sets are a powerful tool that can be enabled for site collections that allow users to keep related documents together as a “set” to facilitate collaboration on the documents. When a user clicks a document set, such as Project X Document Set used in the examples in this section, all the files stored in the document set will be visible, as shown in Figure 20.22. In this way, document sets are similar to folders, but as explained in this section, they have a variety of differences that are important to understand from an administrative standpoint that are reviewed in this section. From a high level, folders are simpler to enable, are more limited in functionality, and so make a better choice for less-advanced users or simpler collaboration requirements. But once the capabilities of document sets are understood, many organizations will benefit from their capabilities.

Figure 20.22. Sample document set in a document library.

Document sets are designed specifically to help users organize groups of files as a unit and give some special tools to users to facilitate the management of the group of documents as a whole such as the ability to assign metadata to a document set, start a workflow on a document set, and capture a version of the entire set of documents. Following are some key technical details of document sets:

• Document sets are not available in SharePoint Foundation 2010.

• Document sets are available in SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise editions.

• A document set is a content type, with Document Collection Folder as the parent, and uses the Name column from the Folder content type and title from the Item content type.

• There is no hard limit on the number of documents that can exist in a document set.

• Permissions changes to a document set do affect all items within the document set.

• An alert set on a document set will apply to contents of the document set.

• Deleting a document set sends the document set and all members of the document set to the Recycle Bin.

• If the Send To feature is used with a document set, the sum for all documents in a document set cannot be larger than 50MB.

• Metadata assigned to the document set is not automatically assigned to members of the document set.

Figure 20.22 shows a sample document set after the document set icon was clicked in a document library. A fairly large icon representing the document set is visible below the Ribbon, which gains a Document Set Manage tab, shown active in Figure 20.22. In this example, a workflow titled Doc Set Approval was started on the document set and the column with the same title is visible on the right. If the Capture Version button in clicked from the Document Set Manage tab, the user is prompted to capture Latest Major Versions Only or Latest Major or Minor Versions. Figure 20.23 shows the Version History window that appears after the capture version is completed for the document set, which clearly displays each document title with the version number appended. This function lets a user capture the exact state of more than one document at a point in time, which is in essence a way of taking a backup of a set of documents and being able to manage these backups by deleting previous backups in the future.

Figure 20.23. Version history for a document set.

Document sets do require some additional configuration to be available to end users, as they need to be enabled from the Site Collection Features, which is explained later in the chapter. The document set content type then needs to be added to the document library before it can be used. Folders, on the other hand, can easily be configured to either be available or not available for a document library from the list or library settings page, by accessing the Advanced Settings link. Document sets can have metadata associated with the document set itself, which is different from folders, which cannot have metadata manually assigned to them. Several other notable differences should be kept in mind when determining whether the organization should use them:

• Document sets are not available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 while folders are available.

• Document sets can be created only in document libraries, whereas folders can be created in either libraries or lists.

• Folders are not allowed within document sets.

• Document sets can’t be nested, whereas folders can be nested.

• Metadata can be assigned to document sets but not folders.

• Workflows can be started on document sets but not folders.