Best Practices Of SharePoint Document Management System

SharePoint is one of the best content management systems available in the market today. Most of the organizations get started with SharePoint for content management. Further, discover they can do a lot more with their content and SharePoint.

SharePoint streamlines content management with plenty of features that help prevent duplication of documents, provide version control, allow easy store, and mobility of documents. The document once created in SharePoint can be used by multiple users at the same time. Although SharePoint is one of the effective ways of content management, it can be made more efficient and productive by following a few of the best practices provided below by ITCube’s SharePoint development experts.

Practice 1:

Initially come up with a document folder structure like a tree-structure, a high-level site map, which is very simple and should not contain multiple levels. At the max two or three levels deep. This facilitates easy navigation and a quick search in SharePoint.

Practice 2:

Sitemap based on different divisions of the organizations

• HR
  • Payroll management
  • Candidate Information
• Production
  • Planning
  • Procurement
  • Supply-chain
  • Quality
• Design development
  • Functional requirements
  • Preliminary CAD Drawings
  • Approved design Drawings
  • Materials and part drawings

1. Design SharePoint with multiple sites and subsites to compliment the simple site-map/tree structure. For instance, make a site for development and testing; create subsites for different functions of these departments. Sync the required sites only to SharePoint Workspace, so that content can be accessed offline. Make use of the standard SharePoint menu to access the content. The use of the main menu will help, when SharePoint is used with its Mobile apps like SharePlus.
   


2. Make use of the RBAC features in SharePoint. Classify the public and private documents in each of the libraries or folders. This will help to secure and preserve confidential information accessible only to a specific list of people.
3. Enable the right navigation settings for easy access to a different site and subsite levels. At first, set the navigation on the site page to view the list of subsites. And then create a view that displays a tree-view of the subsites, when sub-sites are accessed. Enhance the site-view and navigation options with 3rd party plugins that help to 3 or more levels of navigation.
4. Make use of the content type for meta-tagging. Provide the document attributes/meta-tags to support the easy search for documents uploaded in the SharePoint. Make the most use of metatags/ attributes rather than creating network folders.
5. Use the security features, set up alerts for the documents library. Alerts can be configured at a library and document level. It will notify the document owner, if there are any changes/modifications to the document or when the document is deleted.
6. Efficiently use the version control/check-out features as it consumes more memory when you have multiple previous versions of the same document while check-out when enabled, prevents multiple users from modifying the same document at the same time.

SharePoint based document management system advantage is that people can view and edit the official document on the web using the Office web client tool. So there is no need to have MS Office software installed on your computer. SharePoint Server 2013 includes policies that implement auditing, document retention. ITCube has been providing digital enterprise products for many years and continue to lead the industry especially SharePoint solutions. If you are looking for a SharePoint development partner, then your search ends here, contact us today!