I’ve been playing around with the new document set feature of SharePoint 2010, the idea is that you can group a bunch of documents or digital assets and control the metadata for all of them in one location.
When I first saw the demo around the document sets it reminded me of a piece of work I did for a client, they had a legacy system which would group a number of digital assets into a single entity and the search would return this one single entity if the search keyword was found in any of the documents. At the time we came to the conclusion that MOSS wasn’t a suitable replacement because of the way the search subsystem worked. Even with a custom protocol handler applying the correct metadata to each document/asset, at the point you start trying to invoke the various IFilters (doc, pdf, ppt etc) to index the contents of the documents you needed hand off a discrete url with the file extension of the document (the IFilters are invoked based on the url), what would result was a disjointed search experience because the documents would be displayed outside of the set.
A document set is displayed in the document library as a single entity:
When you select the document set, the ribbon changes so you can manage it or you can select the edit properties to manage the common meta-data:
The next thing to look at is the search experience, performing a search for a term that is in one of the documents of the set returns:
In this case I searched for a keyword that was specific to a document, the search results returned a just the single document, no reference to a document set.
Searching for a keyword that is contained in both the document set and document returns:
In this case we get the document set as a result and the document, rather than just a document set, the user has no idea that the document (Internet SharePoint Governance Plan) was apart of a document set.
I’m not saying the document set feature is useless, I think it has some valid scenario’s, I just would have liked it to work a little differently, but I guess the SharePoint team hasn’t changed the search engine under the covers and are constrained in the same way I was. I think the FAST pipeline offers some other alternatives, but I haven’t had a chance to look at that yet.