Solutions for Document Management with Your SharePoint Server

You’ll learn about the properties of a document management solution as well as the process in your SharePoint Server. This article is for you if you’re searching for answers about how document management controls are created, reviewed and published as well as how they’re ultimately disposed of or retained. Document management controls the lifecycle of documents in your organization.

A beneficial document management system ought to be flexible enough to allow you to control a document’s life cycle. Something that fits your company’s culture and goals while allowing your employees to implement a more loosely structured system to suits your enterprise.

An effective document management solution specifies the following:

• What kinds of documents and other content can be created in an organization.
• What template to use for each kind of document.
• What metadata to provide for each kind of document.
• Where to store a document at each stage of its life cycle.
• How to control access to a document at each stage of its life cycle.

Moving documents within a company as a team member edits their documents, reviews, approvals, publication, and disposition can be managed within the SharePoint Foundation features. It implements all these aspects in doing so. The SharePoint Server includes the exact same features plus more.

First decide what your policies your company wants to apply to the documents by conducting an audit. Concerns such as if the documents are retained or disposed of appropriately, and content that is important to the organization is protected. Decide how your team will handle documents as corporate records for legal requirements and guidelines. Ensure the information is easy for your employees to take advantage of the capabilities you put in place without having to depart from their daily operations. Also, use familiar tools, applications in the Microsoft Office system — such as Microsoft Outlook and Word — also include features that support each stage in a document's life cycle.

The planning process includes the following major steps of document management:

1. Identify roles to ensure the plans incorporate the feedback of your company’s key stakeholders and build a team to do so as well as who the participants are.
2. After identifying who works on the documents, analyze the usage to determine the types of documents that they’ll work on and how to use them.
3. Organize your documents with your company’s site collections, sites and libraries within your SharePoint Server that can offer a range of features. This will help organize and store documents, from specialized sites to loosely structured document libraries for quick document creation and collaboration. Within a library, you can additionally organize content into folders and subfolders.
4. Plan how content moves between locations It might be necessary to move or copy a document from one site or library to another at different stages of its life cycle.
5. Plan content types Use content types to organize information about documents, such as metadata, document templates, and workflow processes. This is an important step to help you organize your documents and enforce consistency across your organization.
6. Plan workflows When you plan workflows for your organization, you can control and track how documents move from one team member to another as each participant collaborates in a document's life cycle. SharePoint Server includes workflows for common team tasks such as reviewing and approving documents. SharePoint Server also supports creating and installing custom workflows.
7. Plan content governance You can plan the appropriate degree of control that is based on content type or storage location. For example, you might require that documents in a particular library be checked out before they can be edited.
8. Plan policies for each content type, plan information management policies to make sure that documents are audited, retained, and otherwise handled according to your organization's institutional and legal requirements. SharePoint Server includes policies that implement auditing, document retention, and bar codes, to make sure that printed content can be correlated with corresponding electronic versions.