I just discovered this excellent post and found it quite helpful.

I am interested in your thoughts on how to define a metadata field under the following circumstances:
* The metadata field needs to be validated against a set of predetermined valid values.
* We want certain end users to be able to add to the list of valid values for the field.
* The content type is to be managed as a business record.
* We will need to route it to a record center.

We could use managed metadata, but if we’re going to syndicate the content type for use in the record center, I believe that means that the only people who could add a new “valid value” for the field would be those with access to the content type hub.

We could use a “choice” field type, but again, it seems that users would have to access the content type hub to add a new valid value.

We could use a lookup field, validated against a list, with the list living in the same site collection. List entries cannot be declared as records themselves, meaning someone could remove or change an existing “valid value” from the list, or change a description field in the list stating what that list entry means.

What approach do you prefer when a business record needs a validated metada field to which users can add choices?

Thanks again for the excellent tutorial post!

Regards,

Tim

There are a number of ways that you can approach this so let me take a stab since some option will satisfy some requirements and other option will satisfy others!

In terms of creating a link to the latest version that isnt really possible without some development effort. But what is possible and easy would be to create a view that will show the latest version only for example, but the URL will be different. I assume you want the URL to be consistent so you can send out an email link and have users click on that and open up the document, rather than looking in SharePoint.

Now for the Records Management part this is interesting! Since it seems like you want the reports destroyed before creating others you might be able to do the following:
a) Create a content type called Report with all your metadata that you need
b) Create a column called ‘destruction date’ which will be a calculated column of the last day of the month of the report (pretty easy to do)
c) On the Content Type define an Information Management Policy which states that when the Destruction Date is reached that the report will be declared a record (make sure that you have In-Place RM enabled for the library)

So with this approach you know that at the end of the month your reports will automatically become records in the same location and can then have various retention policies applied.

To easily identify and group all instances of the report you can create views or use metadata driven navigation. One tip would be to create a view called ‘Archived Reports’ and create a filter where the IsRecord field = true, this will give you all your Reports which are currently records.

Let me know if this is any help or if I am on the right track

Cheers

My question is as follows: We have a business team that creates monthly sales actuals reports (a content type). Each instance of the report must be managed as a seperate record (so the January report is a different document from the February report etc) so that their destruction dates can be seperately managed (ie Jan report is destroyed before the Feb report etc).

The business users want to be able to:
a) create a link once off that always points to the “latest” copy of the report, and have it automatically open the most recent report instance for use on a web page displaying other information. (can’t use doc ID as Doc ID is different for each instance.)
b) easily identify and group all instances of that type of report
c) preferrably manage records in-place

Can you provide some suggestions on how best to use content types / folders / document set / content organiser rules or something else to meet the above please.

I was using a lookup list as my property for target location. Basically if the job number is entered then use the value of the job number property as the target location.

However it was not working… every time I tested it, the CO created a new folder with a unique prefix (like Greg mentioned above.) Even if the folder or doc set existed it would create a new folder with a 3 digit prefix.

For example… if my project number was 10001.01 it would create a folder with a 3 digit prefix 585;1001.01. Next project would say 586;1002.01, then 587;1003.01, etc… all the while I already have the projects created as doc sets… just 1001.01, 1002.01, 1003.01, etc… but it would ignore them and create the new folders.

Interestingly enough… if I chose the 1001.01 project a second time… it would not create a second 1001.01 w/ a new prefix, but it would place the second document in the 585;1001.01 folder. So it does recognize existing folders… but only the folder it created with the prefix.

After a day of pulling my hair out… Finally I changed the property to a text string and it worked as advertised. It routed it exactly like it should… worked great for a metadata term set as well.

So the conclusion is that we cannot use a lookup list value as a target location in the content organizer.

So I was wondering if you’ve seen this or possibly have an explanation. I’d really like to use a lookup list. W/ what we are doing with the different lists we’ve found the LU list is much easier to manage than a term set in our environment.

Maybe you can test it to see if I did something wrong.

Thx.
Jason

Is there a way OOTB (or not) to use some metadata fields (LU or managed metadata) to route the documents to a doc set specific to this fields?

For my current application, I will have 1 doc set per project (keyed EP-01, EP-02, EP-03, … which belongs to a projects list). Reason why I have a doc set rather than a folder is that you can download a zip copy of the doc set (which is part of the deliverables for those projects – you need to be able to download and burn on a CD all ‘final’ documents we gathered and produced and this on a project basis)
I was hoping that I could select which project the doc in the drop of library relates to (via a drop down looking up to my projects list) and use
my key (EP-01 etc….) as a parameter in the URL Path: …/Library/DocSet{parameter equals to the value selected in the drop down for the project key, EP-01, EP-02…., RGV-01, RGV-02, etc…}

I do not see this available OOTB but I may be mistaken (please tell me so, it would make my day!)

Thanks again for sharing your knowledge!

Greg

You actually can route to a document set, even though it looks like you can’t because when you click on the browse destination button only folders will appear.
To do this you need to put in the URL of the Doc Set in the Destination field. So for instance if your records library is at http://spahq/Records/RecordsLibrary and your Document Set is name ‘Document Set One’ you would specify ‘http://spahq/Records/RecordsLibrary/Document Set One’ as the URL and it will route to it.
The reason is that a Document Set is actually a folder with some trickery thrown in but this works, try it otherwise I will blog about it soon.

In terms of the prefix you have the option of either having the property name or the unique property or a combination of the two selected. I’m sure this can be changed through code but I haven’t had a look into it.

That is strange..the only thing that I can think of is to make sure that all of the terms that you create in your Term Set, regardless of which level they are at, are available for tagging.

Otherwise I don’t really know what the issue could be since it works for me….