Managing a large volume of documents in an enterprise can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone. For document management to be viable, all documents must be easily and quickly accessible, as well as findable.

Every organization requires a strong system to keep its documentation safe and organized in a way that allows participants to quickly find them and work on them as needed in a collaborative fashion. For storing, maintaining, and sharing files, SharePoint is an excellent tool and framework for end-to-end enterprise-class document management.

The digitalization of the document lifecycle from formation to archiving by the SharePoint document management system can dramatically boost worker productivity and lower operating costs significantly.

This article will cover a variety of topics, including what SharePoint is relative to document management, how to create a SharePoint document management system, why you should use it, and much more. Let’s look further.

What is the SharePoint Document Management solution?

SharePoint serves more purposes than just storing documents. It is an effective tool for managing data and collaborating across calendars, tasks, lists, intranet pages, and more in a secure and accessible manner. SharePoint can be utilized as a system for managing data and resolving collaborative challenges in conventional data sharing.

Finding a document stored on a traditional Windows share on a file server with a lot of files can take time and effort.  File shares tend to grow organically, gathering in size as inactive areas grow over time, leading to an overgrown unmanageable set of endless nested folders that are daunting for new users to navigate.

For the fourth time in a row, SharePoint is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Content Services Systems in 2020. More than 850,000 large and medium-sized organizations are currently using SharePoint as a document management tool.

If you want your SharePoint environment to be flexible enough to accommodate the expansion of your business, you should configure it carefully to allow the growth of documents, sites, and libraries without overloading areas beyond best practice metrics.

You should take into account a variety of factors, including the proper organization of sites, lists, and library resources, the development of your types of content (Content Types), the use of folders, privileges, workflows, search, retention, document disposition, metadata, and more. That is why it is critical to create a scalable, extensible and adaptable SharePoint Document Management system centered on a consistent Information Architecture designed around your business.

1. Checking out the types of Document Management Systems

Choose the different documents you want to keep in your SharePoint DMS. It is not a good idea to consolidate all of your company’s files into a single SharePoint Document Library. SharePoint DMS’s main goal is to group slightly related records with the same security controls.  There are significant limits on library size.  A common error is to overload a single library, eventually resulting in both poor performance and sporadic errors.

You should avoid storing documents from different departments in the same document library or DMS without forethought because they will have specific demographics, audiences with other permissions, and varying levels of security.

Instead, you should divide the libraries up into sites, subsites, and libraries.

2. Design metadata for each of the types of categories

In SharePoint, we use metadata to make it more navigable, searchable, effective, and accessible, in contrast to the conventional configuration of folders and sub-folders that consume enormous memory but still don’t keep it all organized as expected. In reality, it’s a combination of folders and metadata that allows the end user experience to shine.

Folders can be configured to allow for location-based tagging, so the best of both worlds (folders and metadata) can be provided at the same time and with the same user underlying activities. 

In addition to a file’s information is its metadata. If you have a lot of content on your SharePoint site, use metadata to categorize the documents, facilitate quick searches, and speed up navigation. File categories can each have their own specific metadata properties. There’s no real limit to the amount of metadata, but we want to be judicious in the selection, so the metadata serves specific end-user purposes, and is manageable.

So, this is how we configure SharePoint to use metadata. Thus, keyword searches produce the most precise results.

There’s a vast set of metadata types available, from text, lookups, numbers, and currency, to centralized multi-level and multi-lingual enterprise taxonomies.

3. Generate columns for different metadata!

4. Content Type Syndication Hub

The best practice of all is to generate metadata centrally and publish it across the enterprise. We can configure this for your company, allowing for metadata definitions to be published and propagated across all site collections in the enterprise. This applies to any metadata, and not simply just managed metadata taxonomies.

Click here for the full blog......