SharePoint 12 – Document Management
Document management was really just simple check-in and out in v2. Now it’s quite impressive:
- Alerting and RSS feeds on document libraries, as described in this post
- Custom meta-data
- Improved capture of meta-data in Office client applications
- If documents are XML, meta-data can be extracted into lists
- Creation of custom views of lists
- RSS feeds can include the documents as enclosures
- If the documents are PowerPoint slides then lots of useful functions are provided to allow customised presentations to be built up on the fly, taken off-line but kept up to date
- Support for check out to work off-line which caches the documents in a hidden folder under my documents and then allows you to work on it off-line until you are ready to check it in again
- Ability to check-in a document and then immediately check it out again as a single action, great for sharing work in progress snapshots with the team
- Support for minor and major versions
- Ability to only publish major versions to visitors and minor versions to owners and members of a document library, which is a simple content management function
- Support for a variety of workflows, including approval and review/comment, native support in office 12 client for submitting documents into workflows
- Ability to take documents off-line in outlook
- Ability to edit an off-line document from Outlook without checking out, and then for managing potential conflicts arising when checking it back in later
- Document library views show workflow status
- Meta-data in document library lists can be analysed in Access and Excel, or sorted and filtered from the web UI or from Outlook
- Ability for IRM integration, see later post
- Records management, see later post
