SharePoint offers many features that can assist groups with collaboration.  It includes features which improve a department’s ability to find and manage unstructured content such as documents, contracts or spreadsheets among others.  Important collaboration and document management features include:

Share and Edit Documents:

• Store documents created by any program
• Choose whether to keep multiple versions of each document, which allows the recovery of an old version if necessary
• Set up check-in/check-out on documents, or allow multiple people to edit documents at the same time while keeping track of who made the changes
• Copy or move documents to other sites or site collections
• E-mail links to documents, not the document itself

Organize documents:

• Each department can have its own site collection, the top level “container”
• Within the site collection, it is possible to create multiple sites, so each group or project team can organize and manage its own documents
• Within each site, there are lists and libraries
  • Documents are stored in libraries that can be customized to the type of documents (for example, assets, documents, forms, pictures, slides, minutes, contracts, etc)
  • Lists contain non-document information, such as calendars, announcements, contacts, discussions, or tasks

Categorize Documents:

• Can assign unique Document IDs for each document in the site collection
  • Required for proper document management, especially records management
  • If turned on in a site collection, automatically assigns a Document ID to each newly created or uploaded document
  • Composed of a string assigned by the site collection administrator plus a number based on the document library and order of creation
  • Locate documents by the Document ID even if they are moved within the site or between site collections
  • However, list items (tasks, calendar entries, issues, etc) do not get Document IDs
• Create “Content Types” for each site; each document is assigned to a content type
• For example, one Content Type could be Invoice
  • Any type of document can be assigned to a content type, so an Invoice could be a scanned image, a Word document, or an Excel spreadsheet
• Assign metadata to the Content Type; these are pieces of information that get attached to each document of that type
  • Invoices could have Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Company, Total Value, Payment Date, etc
  • Each metadata field can have a default value
  • Depending on the type of the field, can validate the data entered
• Add Tags and Notes
• Group documents by using “Document Sets”; multiple documents can be added to a Document Set, and all of the documents inherit the same metadata and are moved as a group

Security:

• Site collection security managed by the owning group
• Allow access to sites, libraries and lists
• Can set security down to the document level

Manage documents:

• Add workflows to content types for approval, feedback, signature, or disposition
• Declare the document to be a record (cannot be updated after this point)

Calendars:

• Shared among the group
• Can be linked to Outlook calendars

Search for Documents:

• Searches not only document names, but also within the document (for supported document formats)
• Searches within the site, using the currently logged in person’s security
• Search by a specific metadata field
• Set up navigation of the site by metadata fields
• Can search across sites and site collections for documents