Content Organizer in SharePoint 2010

Has your organization ever run into a situation where it wished that it could direct contributors of documents to a single location to “drop off” documents regardless of the type of content?  No URLs to memorize, no worries about permissions or security on any number of different libraries …

SharePoint 2010 has delivered the Content Organizer.  When the Content Organizer site feature is enabled, it creates a drop off library, and utilizes metadata-based routing rules (written and configured by the site owner) which determine the ultimate destination of the delivered content.

It’s very simple to enable and configure this feature.  Simply follow these instructions:

1.       Go to Site Features:

a.       Site Actions

b.      Site Settings

c.       Site Actions à Manage Site Features

2.       Find Content Organizer and click à Activate

3.       Activating this feature creates a Drop Office Library and gives us tools to configure the rules.

4.       Return to Site Settings.

5.       Under Site Administration à select Content Organizer Settings.

a.       Redirect users to the Drop Off Library à check this box.

b.      Sending to another site à If there are too many items to fit into one site collection, checking this box will distribute content to other sites that also have Content Organizers.

c.       Folder Partitioning à The organizer can automatically create subfolders once a target location exceeds a certain size.

d.      Duplicate Submissions à You can choose to use SharePoint versioning, or to append unique characters to the end of duplicate filenames.

e.      Preserving Content à The organizer can save the original audit logs and properties if they are included with submissions. The saved logs and properties are stored in an audit entry on the submitted document.

f.        Rule Managers à Enter the names of those people authorized to create the routing rules, and configure when these people will be notified in the event that documents do not meet a rule and therefore are not routed to an appropriate location.

6.       Under Site Administration à select Content Organizer Rules.

a.       Click à Add new Item.

b.      Enter the rule name (should be a descriptor of the rule).

c.       Rule Status and Priority à Rules should be given a priority.  In the case where a document meets more than one rule, which rules should take priority.

                                                               i.      1 is high

                                                             ii.      10 is low

This is also where you indicate whether a rule is active or inactive.

7.       Submission’s Content Type à By selecting a content type, you are determining the properties that can be used in the conditions of this rule. In addition, submissions that match this rule will receive the content type selected here when they are placed in a target location.

8.       Conditions à In order to match this rule, a submission's properties must match all the specified property conditions (e.g. "If Title ‘contains all of’ Mindsharp”).

9.       Target Location à Specify where to place the content that matches this rule.

You can test this by uploading a document into the Drop Off Library.  SharePoint will prompt you for the metadata during the single document upload.