This is another tip that I found when configuring SharePoint 2010 for my presentation to ARMA which was held on Thursday 28th January.

I got asked a question whether you can automatically cause items to be declared as records based on certain dates, and the answer is of course you can!

To set this up you need to apply a retention policy either on a content type or on a folder as below

Applying Retention Policy

1. Click on Site Action -> Site Settings -> Site Content Types -> (Content Type) -> Information Management Policies
2. Make sure that the ‘Enable Retention‘ check box is selected and then click on ‘Add a retention stage‘
3. Select the Event and then for the action select the ‘Declare Record‘
   

   Retention Choice

   In this way you can automatically declare records after a period of time, quite a cool feature for all the Document and Records managers out there!

Here are some articles that caught my eye in January, there was a whole lot more but I always seem to forget about them after I read them!

• CodePlex Project for Word Automation: Really cool SharePoint designer workflow action that allows you to convert documents into a number of different file formats.
• SharePoint 2010 Records Management: How to set up some basic records management functionality.
• SharePointDevWiki.com Screencasts: Great set of screencasts on various aspects of SharePoint 2010.

One thing that always annoyed was that the context menu in list items in SharePoint 2007 was on the title field or alternatively you had to put in an ‘Edit’ button.

Well no more in SharePoint 2010 as now you can easily customise a view to show the ECB on any field within a list.

1) Within any list click on Library (or List) -> Modify View -> Modify in SharePoint Designer (Advanced). This will open the list up in

Modify in SPD Option

2) For any field wait until you see the little < icon and then select the appropriate option from the men.

Common xsl options

Show List Item Menu: This will attach the context menu to the list item

Show Link To Item: This will take the user to the DispForm.aspx for the item.

One the issues that customers frequently experience with MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 was the inability to link to documents and then move them around the same site collection. In SharePoint 2007 the link to a document was a URL that referenced the location of the document, if the document changed location then the link to the document was broken, which was painful.

Many people asked for unique numbering in documents and content within SharePoint 2007, now this all comes out of the box in SP 2010! In addition you can also create your own DocumentID by overriding the DocumentIDProvider abstract class so you can have whatever format of Document ID’s that you like!

What this means is that now SharePoint offers the following:

1. Unique numbering for documents
2. You can now store documents in any location and they will still be able to be referenced by the original URL that it is assigned.

Configuration

So first things is first, to enable the Document ID Feature enable it from Site Collection Features:

The Document ID Site Collection Feature

When this is done you will see a new option under ‘Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration’ called Document ID Settings. When you click on this you will see the following options avaiable:

Document ID Settings page

Assign Document IDs

• Assign Document ID’s: You click this and all existing documents and new documents will get an ID.
• Begin ID’s with the following characters: This is the 4-12 document ID that you can configure. All that SharePoint will do is add a “- number” to the end of this like -1,-2 and so forth. If you don’t like this then you will have to write your own provider (see below)

Document ID Look Up Search Scope

• Use this search scope for ID Lookup: This is really cool. You can create a scope and then if a user enters in a document ID then it will directly open up instead of going to the results page. There are however some extra steps with this that I will post!

Now if you view a document you see the following added to the Properties:

Now instead of a location based URL there is a link to /_layouts/DocIDRedir.aspx with the document ID at the end!

Creating your own Provider

If you don’t particularly like the way that SharePoint increments the unique id (which is actually adding 1 to the end) then you can always create your own. To do this you need to do the following:

1) Create a class that derives from Microsoft.Office.DocumentManagement.DocumentIdProvider which is listed below

namespace Microsoft.Office.DocumentManagement
{
public abstract class DocumentIdProvider
{
protected DocumentIdProvider();

public abstract bool DoCustomSearchBeforeDefaultSearch { get; }

public abstract string GenerateDocumentId(SPListItem listItem);
public abstract string[] GetDocumentUrlsById(SPSite site, string documentId);
public abstract string GetSampleDocumentIdText(SPSite site);
}
}

2) Register the provider by using any of these methods since I couldn’t find (and neither could Michel Berneveld who wrote  a great article about this, see below) a stsadm or powershell command which sort of sucks.

public static void SetDefaultProvider(SPSite site);
public static void SetProvider(SPSite site, Type providerType);

Links

• The Document ID documentation from MSDN
• How to create a custom document ID provider for SharePoint 2010: Great article from Michel Barneveld
• Microsoft forum discussion on the subject

The articles that I read and particularly liked this week were:

• Per Location View Settings from Japp Vossers: Its amazing how many new options there are in 2010 and how little people know about them!
• Creating Workflows in SharePoint 2007 17 part series: 17 pages of workflow goodness, especially good if you are trying to get a basic understanding about workflow.
• Branding SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Sites: Really good information on how the new SP2010 theming engine works, possibly the only information out there at the moment!
• 36 Software Start Up Tips: A great collection of tips for a software startup which I intend to use, if and when I finally own a start up that is.
• Building a SharePoint Development Farm: This has some really good information, more in depth than most of the other blog posts that I have read, about how to build a farm.
• Improvements in SharePoint 2010: MSDN article focusing on the improvements in workflow in SP2010. Talks about new workflow types, InfoPath 2010 and other workflow features.
• Styled Point: A site concentrating on SharePoint branding, where the hell is the RSS feed though

Remember if you like any of these articles let the authors know!

This is one of the few non SharePoint articles out there but I think a really cool tip.

If you like to create a short cut to ‘God Mode’ within Windows 7, which gives you every single option available to configure in Windows 7 in one easy spot, then simply create a folder with the following name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Then instead of a folder you get the following icon:

Then when you click into it you have all the various options displayed like below, plus a few more. But in essence you can now administer all the possible functions from one place:

Options now available

I did a presentation for the Vancouver SharePoint Users Group last night about some of the new document management features in SharePoint 2010.

It details some of the new features as it applies to document management so have a look.

Managing documents in SharePoint 2010 from Vanspug on Vimeo.

If you are getting this error when try to add a custom column of the Metadata type to your site collection then simply use the following command to activate this feature:

STSADM -o activatefeature -id 73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C -url http://<server> -force

Where the <server> feature is the name of the server, since this is a farm feature. I don’t know why this isn’t enabled (since on other installation I didn’t see this error) but at least its a fix.

Good luck

Publishing content types through the Managed Metadata Service is an extremly powerful feature of SharePoint 2010 but it does require some steps. The ability now to control content types from a central location and control all aspects of publishing is an amazing feature so check it out!

I have broken this down into three sections: Configuring the Managed Metadata Service, Configuring the Content Type Hub and finally configuring receiving site collections since you need to do all three to get this working, but once you do you can easily update your content types cross site collections and even cross farms!

Configuring the Content Type Hub

The first things to do is to create a Site Collection that will act as our content type hub. This hub will be where we will define the content types that we wish to share out via the Managed Metadata Service.
Some things to note: it doesn’t matter what the Site Collection template that you use but I would suggest using a blank template since you dont get any added overhead of some of the lists that are created.

1) Create a Site Collection and enable the ‘Content Type Syndication Hub’ feature in Site Collection Settings.

This will mark the site collection as our hub that we can expose via our Managed Metadata service. Enable this feature in the Site Collection Features listing.

Enable this feature

2) Create a Content Type that you wish to publish out.

This is the same as creating a content type in MOSS 2007 but latter on you will have some other options available as shown in the below image. For now just create a content type and add some columns, even cooler you can now create your own Managed Metadata columns that you can use, sweet!

My Content Type

Configuring the Managed Metadata Service (MMS)

Next we have to configure the Managed Metadata Service so that it can expose our content types stored in our hub that we created above. This service will then expose our content types to which ever Web Applications are serviced by it.

1) Create or alter a MMS so that the content type hub is the Site Collection that we created in the first steps.

This will tell the MMS that it is to consume the Content Types from this site collection. To do this go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications then click on the  ’Managed Metadata Service’ row and then select ‘Properties‘. Its actually not that easy, if you click on the text you will be taken to the Term Store page which you dont want so just highlight the row and click manage as seen below:

Click on the Properties link to get to the properties page

Now scroll to the bottom and type in the URL of the Site Collection that we have set up as our Site Collection Hub.
Also check the ‘Report Syndication Errors…” box as well, why wouldn’t you?

Be sure to fill in the Content Type hub with the URL from stage 1

2) Configure the MMS Connection to consume the content types.

Now we need to tell the service connection where to consume content types from. To be honest I should know the exact difference between the Connection and the Service but I dont, sorry .
What I do know is that you have to follow the same procedure as above except this time you select the row ‘Managed Metadata Service Connection‘ and then press properties. Don’t click on the actual text or again you will be taken to th area where you can enter term sets.

Once you are there you will see the screen below so select the ‘Consumes content types from the Content Type Gallery..‘ so that this connection will use the content types from our Site Collection.Incidentally you can also make this MMS the default for keyword and term sets if you want to in here as well.

Check the box marked to consume our Content Type Gallery

3) Create a new Site Collection to consume the Content Types from

Easy enough but remember that the new Site Collection has to be on a Web Application that is being serviced by the MMS that we just configured!

Pushing out content types

We are nearly there. So we have configured the Content Type Hub, set up the Managed Metadata Service and now we are ready to start pushing the Content Types out, but there is a couple more steps unfortunately!

1) Publish out the select Content Types

Now that we have everything set up lets publish our types. Select the content type we created and click on ‘Manage publishing for this content type‘, you should see the screen below. Then click on ‘OK‘ to publish this guy out!

Click OK to publish!

2) Fire off the Timer Jobs for publishing Content Types

Since we are impatient we have to set off the timer jobs ourselves to get this running. Go to Central Administration -> Monitoring -> Review Job Definitions and run the Content Type Hub job, then run the Content Type Subscriber job in that order.

Run the jobs!

3) Check out the content types in the receiving Site Collection

Now go back to the receiving site collection and check out the new content types. Click on Site Settings ->Content Type publishing and see the new content types! Or not…
Unfortunately you will get the following error messages, so all you need to do is enable the ‘Document ID Service’,republish again and you will have your content types available!!

Damn feature not enabled!

For everyone annoyed when you cant find the key here it is:

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Beta Key: PKXTJ-DCM9D-6MM3V-G86P8-MJ8CY

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Enterprise Beta: BV7VC-RMR6B-26P6Y-BTQDG-DX2KQ