Using Document Properties with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Many organizations have a large amount of documents of the same type, lying around in shared folders or distributed over different organizational units. The information within these documents cannot be used for a search or accessed directly from outside the document. It is also not available for any kinds of filtering, grouping and sorting. The only known attributes from outside the document are the file name, the title, the date of the last change and the author, who created the document.
Imagine, you have contract documents with the name and the address of the customer inside and want to make it available from outside. So this is there the MOSS 2007 document library offers a smart solution for your problem.
In the first step, you create a document library on the server for Word documents and extend it with the text fields ‘Customer’ and ‘Customer Address’.
Custom document library in SharePoint 2007 with 'Customer' field
Now, if a new document for the library is created, it has the properties ‘Customer’ and ‘Customer Address’ directly available.
Document with custom properties in MS Office Word 2007
The document can now be saved and the values inserted for the two custom fields are visible in the list. So, you can use all out-of-the-box functions for list sorting, filtering, grouping and searching on your custom document content information.
Document library with new contract
But what happens, if you want to change the address of the customer? Just edit the value in the list and the document will be updated or edit the property of the document in MS Office Word 2007 and the list value will be updated.
Editing the properties in the list item
With this technique all important values inside a document can be used and even changed from outside.
Document with changed address value.
So, make your hidden information visible, searchable and changeable!
