Matthew was a speaker at the European SharePoint Conference 2011. Check out this insighful blog by Matthew Hughes.

The Content Organiser is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 that provides the ability to move content based on a set of rules.
The Content Organiser can be activated on a per site bases and when activated creates a "Drop of Library" which is where you upload your documents and then have them moved based on the rules you create.

In this post we will take a look at how to activate the content organiser and make use of it by setting up a rule.

Activating the feature
As the Content Organiser is a site feature, you will find the feature in Site Actions > Site Settings > Site Actions > Manage Site Features and clicking

As you can see in the screenshot above, the feature is activated and you can see the Drop Off Library on the left hand side in the quick launch.

If you head back to Site Settings you can now see a couple of new options under Site Administration

Setting up a Rule
We could take a look at the settings at this point but it's probably worth creating a rule and seeing how it works before we check out the settings.

Assuming you are still looking at the Site Settings, click on Content Organizer Rules and you may be surprised to see this,

That's right, it's a standard SharePoint List, well sort of.

The Content Organizer Rules is a custom list and if you click on Add New Item, you will see the following form

The options in the form should be fairly self explanatory but some of the most common problems you will have are either picking the wrong Content Type or incorrectly setting up the rule, I always suggest setting up a fairly loose rule when testing this for the first time just so you can see it working.

In my example above, I have created a rule that will move any document that has a Title that isn't empty.

So any Document without a title will be moved to the Shared Documents Library and unless I get time to make a video, you will have to take my word for it that this works perfectly.

Content Organizer Settings
If we head back over to Site Actions > Site Settings we can go ahead and click on the Content Organizer Settings and have a look at some of the settings within it.

Most of the settings have descriptions so I won't labour over them too much but points of interest in the settings are (top of the form to bottom),

a. Notice in the description area for this list you can jump straight to the rules (purple link) which is quite handy.

b. Sending to another site -  I know what you're thinking and yes you can send to another content organiser for further sorting for those of you not thinking that and instead thinking why would that be a good idea, imagine a situation where users upload to a central location and then when the documents are re routed the go into sub sites with their own content organizers and rules, this allows for central management of the main Content Organizer and then having sub site owners to manage their own Content Organizers too without having to manage the top site Content Organizer.
Sounds cryptic but re-read it and you will get it, if not leave a comment here and i'll make a diagram.

c. Folder Partitioning - Let's say you want to make sure no folder hits that magical 5000 item limit, this will allow the document libraries to magically create a new folder when it hits that limit. Genius!

d. Rule Managers -  Great if you you want to delegate the management of the Content Organizer and also notice the "Email rule managers when submissions do not match a rule setting" this is great as if the documents do not match a rule, they just hang about in the drop off library, not so good.

Anyways, that is it, Content Organizer in a nut shell, any questions let me know and I hope that helps some of you out there.

Thanks

Matthew Hughes

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