Real life Document Management on SharePoint

It's interesting how many blogs, articles and whitepapers are out there regarding document management on SharePoint. But there aren't really that many articles touching on real-life experience with implementing this for larger organisations (let me know if you find any good ones).

In my experience, implementing SharePoint for DM comes down to addressing three key areas, and the following is a summary of experience/best-practice that has been implemented in a number of larger organisations - including some very well respected law firms (and we all know that they are demanding when it comes to DM). These key areas are:

1) Structure
2) Extending
3) Surfacing

STRUCTURE
DM on SharePoint, like any other DM solution, requires some planning to ensure that the long-term document volumes are well supported. The solution must therefore be designed at max future capacity (uncommon) or designed to scale to future capacity requirements (more common).

SharePoint has the unfortunate reputation of not being able to cope with volume. This is simply a misconception. My guess is that many have thought that SharePoint out of the box would magically know how to structure millions of documents in a navigable and scalable structure. It doesn't and some work is required for you to get it right. But it's not rocket science.

For a recent client - a large law firm (and off-spring from a global top 5 law firm) - we implemented our best practice and we can comfortably claim that scaling to around 10TB is possible without issues (all things being equal and all sorts of other caveats).

The best practice (shown for a law firm here) is simply:

[web app root site collection]
/clients [managed path]
.../[Client Site Collection]
....../[logical sub site]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
....../[logical sub site]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
.../[Client Site Collection]
.../[Client Site Collection]
.../[Client Site Collection]

The structure above sub-divides the overall structure into neat and manageable containers (Site Collections, Sites and Document Libraries).

Importantly, it breaks up the document volume across Site Collections, which then allows you to limit the size of content databases, by associating Site Collections to different content databases. The actual physical storage limit of a Site Collection / Content database varies depend on who you ask. Typically from 50GB to a few hundred GB (we have tested 400GB successfully) per Content Database is generally accepted.



EXTENDING
There are some gaps in SharePoint that you will want to address... We tend to address most of them with a great SharePoint Add-On (WISDOM DMF Pro) from our excellent partners in Australia, MacroView.

Unique Document Numbering
I.e. a document may have a unique ID in a Document Library, but this same ID will most certainly exist for another document in another Document Library. One of the features that we get with DMF Pro is a central feature to provision such unique IDs on saving a document into a library.

Document Reference
The feature above is enhanced further, by also allowing DM administrators to set their own variables for a document reference. E.g. "[Doc ID] - [Project Number] - [Client Number ] - [Title]" which is saved into the document properties.... Excellent for document footers I tell you ;-)

Provisioning
A DM is rarely a stand-alone app, so extending SharePoint and providing web-services for automated provision of areas (site collections, sites and document libraries). Commonly we see this used by accounting, crm or "Practice Management Systems" during the workflow of creating clients or client projects/matter.

Permissions
It goes without saying that some areas (sensitive matters/projects etc) need tight security and in my experience, providing an efficient way of doing this reduces the risk of this task being "forgotten". We have had good results from providing a simple interface (web service) for automated lock-down of areas. I.e. a workflow, or other can, during the provisioning process, fire off a request to lock down a site or document library to specific AD users or groups.


There are a few more details .... but enough for now... over to surfacing.

SURFACING
It ain't going to be a success if your users don't like using it. I tend to use the term "surfacing" to cover everything that we do to "surface" SharePoint to the desktop. I.e. any desktop client apps, office plug-ins etc. The key is to make it as intuitive as possible for the user to use SharePoint as their DM repository. Here again we use the WISDOM DMF (Pro) Add-on for SharePoint which allows us to give the users a consistent experience across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, in addition to Adobe Reader/Acrobat. So all the save to / open from is handled neatly. Searching for documents on SharePoint is available straight from the plug-in. Drag & drop in Outlook for email management and lots more. All out of the box.

Right that's it for now.... I might add a bit more detail to this article. But feel free to comment/ask questions ....