We are sharing some of our overall document management experience and some simple SharePoint document automation tips that can improve your business’s performance and efficiency.

We will go over the essentials of building a successful SharePoint document management system and some tricky issues you might overlook.

SharePoint document management and automation overview.

Much has been written about SharePoint document management and automation. Much more will be written in the future because documents are not going away, at least not in the near future, and we need to manage them. The more efficiently we can complete the task, the better.  

If you’ve come across information on unsuccessful attempts at SharePoint document management and Microsoft’s suggestion of limiting containers to 5000 items in SharePoint 2010 or 2013, and 2000 items in SharePoint 2007, you might infer that SharePoint isn’t optimized for managing extensive document volumes.

SharePoint can handle massive amounts of documents; the only thing that must be considered is to be designed correctly from the start.  

Configuring SharePoint to handle document management at scale requires adaptability to your company’s growth trajectory. Numerous factors come into play, including structuring sites, lists, and libraries effectively, defining content types, organizing folders, managing permissions and workflows, implementing robust search capabilities, ensuring proper retention policies, and more. Consequently, building a scalable and flexible SharePoint Document Management and Automation System is imperative, albeit a complex undertaking.

Plan your SharePoint document management strategy  

The first thing you need is a clear and precise plan in which you can describe aspects of SharePoint document management. If you want to avoid problems in the future, you must create a proper architecture for SharePoint document management.  

To make things easier, we have created a list of everything required for a well-designed SharePoint document management system, similar to a plan.  

Make a strategy for SharePoint document management.  

1. Examine existing documentation. Determine the document types and properties.
2. Create a content-type structure that is adaptable and easily extensible.
3. Determine where and how documents will be stored in SharePoint.
4. Construct fields, sites, libraries, and lists. Include new content types;  
5. Plan for permission;  
6. Define and automate the naming of SharePoint documents;  
7. Unify the location of document templates;  
8. Separate content into smaller files;  
9.  Automation of SharePoint documents;  
10. Improve views and libraries;

The plan will, of course, vary depending on the company’s maturity. However, creating a good document and content management system on SharePoint will be difficult without clearly defined points.  

Step 1: Review existing documents. Determine the document’s type and properties.  

Existing documents, data, and organizational processes fuel your project’s journey to developing appropriate document management systems with SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint 2010. Analyzing existing documents, data, and methods and discussing them with people from various departments will assist you in developing a picture of SharePoint architecture, a list of required properties, libraries, SharePoint lists, content types, SharePoint document automation and document generation scenarios, review or approval workflows, and permissions.  

When we look at documents and processes in document management, we can see that they have many similarities, such as error-free document generation, easy search, data or document aggregation, reporting, document expiration management, approval, and so on.  

As a result, when reviewing documents, you should pay special attention to:   

• What documents do they use, how do they appear, and what content types should you create to describe the documents fully?
• What information could be automatically filled into documents?
• Should I use that information as document metadata?
• What information must be organized into lists for you to benefit from it by reusing it in future documents? Companies or employee lists are good examples of data that can be reused through lookups. 

Let us now discuss document and content types. Document types are various types of documents that an organization may use.SharePoint content types serve as containers encompassing a set of document properties, their arrangement, and document templates. If you’re questioning whether a document type and a content type are equivalent, the answer is essentially yes, or extremely similar.

So, should the number of document types be the same as the number of content types? In most cases, the answer is no because it is preferable to have the parent-child content type structure to ensure future scalability, flexibility, and ease of management of content types. In minimal environments, however, there may be no or only a few content types available for creating documents from templates. However, I recommend using content types for better information structuring.  

Attributes. The primary purpose of establishing attributes is to facilitate sorting or searching through data, populate documents with information, leverage attribute fields for calculations or automation, provide item descriptions in lists, and support reporting and business intelligence objectives.

Where should property fields be added? It is recommended creating them at the site level and adding them to document libraries via content types. In most cases, we only develop columns at the site level for document libraries; we use local list columns for lists. When setting up property fields, it’s important to select the suitable data type. Keep in mind that each extra lookup field will decrease the rendering speed of the SharePoint list view.

Step 2: Design a flexible and easily extensible content-type structure.  

Before creating content types, carefully plan the structure, hierarchy, and metadata

• Create content types at the root site if you want them to be used on all areas in your site collection (home).
• To make management easier, assign your custom content types to new meaningful groups. You can, for example, categorize content types by departments: HR, IT, Projects, and so on.

Because groups are alphabetically ordered, we use the “_” symbol in the group name to ensure that my custom content type groups are at the top of the Site content types list, where they can be easily found.

Always base your custom content types on standard out-of-the-box SharePoint content types (for example, for List form types, use standard “Item,” and for document content types, use standard “Document”). This will enable you to perform SharePoint upgrades in the future without sacrificing customizations.

• Due to the hierarchical connection, settings (fields) defined in one content type (parent) can be reused in other content types (child). The content-type hierarchy can be expanded to infinite width and depth, although it’s advisable to adhere to a three-level parent-child hierarchy as a best practice.

Hierarchy of parent-child content types: a closer look at a sales/accounting scenario:

Your sales team would like to generate Quotations and Invoices.

Your sales team aims to produce both Quotations and Invoices. Determine the amount of identical metadata required for both document types (Quotations and Invoices). This will facilitate the creation of a “Sales” parent content type (derived from the SharePoint “Document” content type) featuring the following columns:

• Document Date
• Customer
• Total

Following this, you would develop two separate child content types, namely “Quotations” and “Invoices,” which would inherit the columns from the parent content type “Sales.” Next, to finalize the column collection, incorporate distinct columns into the child content types: for Invoices, include “Due Date,” and for Quotations, include “Valid Until.”

To establish a unique configuration template, generate a new content type inheriting from either Quotations or Invoices as necessary. This allows you to reuse the required set of columns while still using various templates.

The following is the final chain of content types: Document -> Sales (for storing significant properties that apply to child levels) -> Quotations (for storing all required fields for Quotations) -> Quotation Template1 (for storing Template1 information using the collection of columns from Quotations)

 

   

Consider useful metadata and avoid inserting too many columns in your content types. Avoid filling out a lot of required fields as well. Users will not appreciate wasting time filling out lengthy forms. Alternatively, you can use our SharePoint document automation solution to fill in most columns automatically. 

Is SharePoint a document management system? Indeed, and it is one of the most popular of its kind. So if you are interested in adding it to your management processes, please contact us.

At Alcero we offer personalized advice on everything you need to know to make it the perfect management tool for your company. Ask for more information about our EDM services at 514-316-5064 or [email protected].

We are Alcero and we provide you with business solutions of the highest level!