What is a Document Set?
When working on projects, people seldom create individual documents. For many kinds of projects, it might be more typical to produce a set of multiple related documents. In some cases, this set of documents might be the end result of a project, or the “deliverable.”
For example, a professional services company might produce a pitch book in response to each request for proposal that it receives from a possible client.
In other cases, this set of documents might simply represent different types of information that support a larger project and result in the creation or delivery of something else. For example, a manufacturing company might produce a standard set of documents related to design, testing, and fabrication for each product it manufactures.
Quick Steps for Setting Up a Document Set
- Enable Documents Sets in Site Settings
- Go to document library you want the document set to be in.
- In Library settings, advance settings; Allow management of content types.
- Go back to document library and “add from existing contents” to select add the Document Set content type to your library. Feel free to make it the default content type for the library.
- Go back to the document library and selected Library Tools / Documents (or Files in 2013), go to New Document (use the drop down to select “Document Set”.
- Add the name of the document set you want to create.
- Go back to the document library and click on the Document Set you created.
- From there you add/create/upload documents in to the new document set. (In SP2013 you can also drag documents into the document set)
- Consider placing your document sets in a library (and not intermingle them with individual files) in the same library.
- Document sets are possible by adding a Document Set content type to a document library.
- Create your custom document set content type (named for the function it is providing (New Hire Package) for instance.
- Configure the settings for the custom document set content type to include the default files that you want uploaded to the document set every time a document set is created (in that library)
- Apply that content type to the library that you want to use (maybe name the library “New Hire Packages”. You may want it to be the only content type in the library (or make it the default content type and have it be the only one that is showing)
- When you create new documents sets in that library in the future, they will automatically include the files that you specified in the “default” section of the custom document set content type that you are using with the library that you called “New Hire Packages”.
