SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management

There are three scenarios or scopes that the team designed for - the library, the document repository and then large scale repositories. The third isn't covered specifically here, but it's basically an architectural strategy that uses many components  (e.g. Content Organizer and FAST) to manage millions of files across sites. Other highlights are described in sections below.

Team Library

  • A list template 
  • Typically 100 to 200 files
  • Used for small projects and teams
  • Performance much improved and few real limits. Indexes are generated automatically, though you can always control as you like.
  • Multiple document selection and operations now standard
  • Nice Ribbon UI to aid management at the document and library scope

Document Center

  • A site template 
  • 500 to 500,000 files
  • Typically used as a central document repository
  • Nothing you can't do with team libraries, but a nice package 

Remote BLOB Storage (RBS)

  • Configured per Content DB
  • Better CAPEX for large scale deployments (>5 TB)
  • Better OPEX for fault tolerance, backup/restore and geo-replication
  • Requires SQL 2008 R2

Document IDs

  • Unique identifier across the company
  • Fully pluggable - can plug your own web service to generate your IDs
  • Can move files around and always locate a file with its document number

Term Sets

  • A hierarchical taxonomy, finally a way to do cascading lookups out-of-box!
  • Can be defined as open or closed; open allows users add new elements to the taxonomy
  • there is a central library of term sets, or you can create a local term set
  • Multi-lingual! You don't need to choose one language or another, you can implement several

 Metadata-based navigation

  • Provides a tree-view that lets you drill down into files by their metadata the same way you would navigate to them if they were stored in folders with those names
  • Can be combined with filters
  • Works within a site collection

Document Sets

  • A way to relate files together, like a folder but with different powers
  • For example, a sales proposal with a document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation
  • Can perform operations on the entire set, for example conversion to PDF (document assembly)
  • A set can have a Document ID, as can all the files within it.
  • You can customize the landing page for a Document Set, for example to instruct people on the sales proposal process

Content Type Syndication

  •  You can enable the Managed Metadata service and then publish a content type for syndication to other site collections or farms

Content Organizer

  • Basically the record routing from the Records Center has been unleashed for any library.
  • Allows you to specify rules so that when files enter the drop-off folder (or library), rules are applied to route the file(s) or Document Set into the correct location
  • Eli's Note: This doesn't mean that Microsoft is advocating the proliferation of folders rather than use of metadata. But it does better support the scenarios where folders (or libraries) each have distinct security settings, and then users still use the generated navigation or flat views of the library. You could also use this for document management scenarios where you want to simply route files into the appropriate fiscal year folder, and then have retention policies apply to all library content. The best practice will be to architect libraries and folders for document management and security, and provide the metadata-based navigation and other conventional views to users working with the libraries - they don't need to be aware of the underlying structures.

Scale

  • Compound index support
  • Automatic index management
  • Query throttling with fallback
  • Scale targets: a million items per folder, tens of millions in a library, hundreds of millions in a large repository
  • FAST search is used to retrieve content

Miscellany

  • Great support for folksonomies - users can build their own tags like "I liked this" or "How-To" and then get a view of all the files they've tagged.
  • Location-based defaults. Can set default values for properties in any given folder
  • CMIS Support - An OASIS committee with participation from IBM, EMC, Microsoft and 14 other vendors to rationalize the interoperability between repositories. This allows applications to target one or more ECM repositories. Multiple protocols supported including REST and SOAP. Announced for the first time today! There will be a pack available to provide CMIS producer and consumer capabilities

Information based on a sessions by Adam Harmetz and Ryan Duguid at SharePoint Conference 2009 (#SPC09).

 

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