Document Sets

I'm continuing my series of posts highlighting some of the (many) new features which are going to be coming in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.  

The content management capabilities of SharePoint have been extended, allowing you to group documents together as a document set. In MOSS 2007, there are quite a lot of useful document management features around metadata, policies, workflows and so on. In Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, those features have been extended to also apply to groups of documents. So you can gather together, for example, a Word document, Excel spreadsheet and a PDF and define metadata on all three at once, have workflows act upon the entire set and define policies that work on the three files together.

Document sets can contain any type of file and all the usual document management features can be applied to the set as a whole, or to the individual files within the set. So you can have some metadata fields which apply to the whole set, but have others filled out for the specific documents within them. You can do the same with security, permissions and content management policies.

This makes it so much easier to group related documents together.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!