Document Management with lots of Appendicies

Question

I have been using SharePoint online for a while and finding it very useful. I am in the process of trying to create a document control library.

I have several policies / procedures that need to be logged and my plan was to do this using metadata to move away from folders but I am running in to a bit of an issue with documents that have appendicies. For example 1 core policy document can have up to 10 associated documents as Appendicies - Appendix A, B, C, D etc.

Just having a flat file structure in the document library can mean it begins to look quite messy. The previous approach was to have all documents listed and then links alongside them to all the appendix documents.

I just wondered if anyone had any advice on how best to organise this information so it is easy to use from a user perspective and reasonably straightforward to maintain.

Thanks

Chris.

Answer 1

Have you considered document sets? It's a content type where you can add in all sorts of different documents into a set so that a user sees a 'top level' document (like a policy) but if they expand it, they can see any other document in that set.

We use it in our environment for our policy documents. We have a new set for policy, but within it is contained the procedure and any relevant forms as well. Works well and is very nicely displayed for our users.

Here's some links that might be helpful in deciding if this will work for you: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ecm/2011/10/18/introducing-document-sets/ https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-and-configure-a-new-document-set-content-type-9db6d6dc-c23a-4dcd-a359-3e4bbbc47fc1