Understanding document set - Part 1

One of the cool new features available in SharePoint 2010 is document set. We can consider document set as a folder in which there can be one or more document resided. Consider it a folder with advance functionalities.

Document set is a collection of documents. Documents can be word, excel, PowerPoint or simply any office document.

Document set is a content type, so ultimately we are defining what all content types are allowed in a document set and then we can create a document set based on those content types.

Example, let’s say you have one project going on and you have a defined process to prepare some documents for the project. First requirement document is being prepared, then some technical draft is prepared, at the same time some budgeting proposals are prepared and then sales plan document is prepared.

There can be a scenario where all your documents share common metadata properties, and then you might want to club those documents into one for easy search and version control.

If you have some process or fixed set of documents for some reason then you can combine all those documents into one single document set.

Document set has a default web part page that comes when you open the document set which gives us the information on properties of the document set and shows all documents that are part of the document set.

Some of the advantages of document set are:


1) Common metadata for all documents in document set
2) Automatic creation of documents when setting up the document set
3) Web part page that shows the properties of document set and which is customizable. We can have a dedicated customized web part page per document set if we want.
4) Document set has their own ribbons to carry out actions related to document set.
5) One of the main advantages is workflow directly on document set rather than running individual workflow for each document in document set.
6) Versioning on document set rather than versioning on each document in document set.
7) Permissions can be set on document set rather than each individual document.
8) Download all documents as zip package rather than downloading individual document.

Explore more in to see document set in action in part 2