Overview

  • In SharePoint 2007, content organization was largely a matter of upload decisions based on the individual
  • Administrators could help guide, but ultimately, was up to contributors to decide where the content ended up
  • New Content Organizer in SharePoint 2010 allows routing decisions to be centrally organized
  • This feature takes the decisions out of the hands of users and ensures that items are well organized
  • Users are guided to enter the appropriate metadata rather than being allowed to dump documents wherever they like
  • Routing rules from SharePoint 2007 are now replaced by content organizer,
  • New SharePoint feature available in all document libraries.
  • Used to route documents to the right folder based on content types and any other metadata that you require.
  • Activated as a Site Feature:
    • Enable-SPFeature -id DocumentRouting -url “<site url>”

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  • Automatic routing of documents to the right place in SharePoint enables administrators to automatically enforce rules on content submitted
  • End users don’t have to be aware of which document library document should go into
  • Content Organizer creates a drop off library where all documents to be routed should be placed
  • SharePoint moves documents that were submitted by users to appropriate place, based on:
    • Rules for content rerouting
    • Metadata
    • Content Types
    • Property based conditions
  • Content organizer allows application of multiple rules
  • Use the priority option to give one rule more importance over another
  • Has the ability to automatically create subfolders based upon metadata (i.e. folder for each year)

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  • When content organizer rules are pointing to document libraries and a user tries to upload a document to them, SharePoint 2010 will redirect them to the drop off library for routing
  • Content organizer settings allow rules to send documents to sites outside of the current site collection
  • Settings also allow versioning via unique characters rather than SharePoint versioning and preserve all properties and auditing on the original document that was routed

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E-mail Integration with Content Organizer

  • Feature that allows a site to use content organizer to route email messages as well
  • Activated as a Site Feature:
    • Enable-SPFeature -id EMailRouting -url “<site url>”

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  • On activation a new hidden list called “Submitted E-mail Records” is created that is configured through Content Organizer Settings

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  • Content type for the content organizer email rule is “E-mail Submission”
  • You can see below how you can have property based rules based on commonly used email fields like to, from, cc, subject, etc…

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**Note: You need to have incoming email configured in Central Admin –> System Settings –> Configure incoming e-mail settings and you need to have E-mail configured at the library level

***Note: What’s wierd is that this email submission list is of an announcements type list and the items go in there as an announcement content type.   Thanks to some colleagues that pointed out to me that there seems to be a bug in RTM where even if you have all the configurations set up, e-mails don’t get routed to the content organizer correctly or the rules just don’t seem to fire, they just seem to stay in that list.  I’m not sure yet that it is a bug and if the latest Cumulative Updates from Microsoft fix it.  Someone please let me know.

 

So, why are content type publishing hubs important for Records Management?

  • It’s now an Enterprise level feature that allows you to manage content across site collections
  • Finalized document can be copied to a specific mandated folder in the ‘Approved’ Document library based on metadata properties without any user intervention.

The complete list of this series can be seen by the following links:

1. Introduction
2. Document IDs
3. Managed Metadata Service (Term Store)
4. In-Place Records Declarations
5. Site Collection Auditing
6. Content Organizer
7. Compliance Details
8. Hold and eDiscovery
9. Content Type Publishing Hubs
10. Multi-Level Retention
11. Virtual folders and metadata based navigation
12. Scaling
13. Send To…
14. Document Sets

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee558288%28office.14%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556829(office.14).aspx
http://dotnetmafia.sys-con.com/node/1324338
http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2010/02/sharepoint.html

 

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