A Document Set is a group of related documents that you can manage as a single entity. You can create a Document Set in a single step, and then define its characteristics and metadata.

What is a Document Set?

For many kinds of projects, people often produce a whole set of related documents. In some cases, this set of documents might be the result of a project, or the “deliverable.” For example, a professional services company might produce a standard “pitch book” when they respond to a request for proposal from a possible client. The pitch book might always contain these pieces, with each piece customized according to the specific requirements of a particular project:

An introduction to the services company

A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis

A business plan

A comparable company analysis

In other cases, this set of documents might only represent different types of information that support a larger project and result in the creation or delivery of something else. For example, a manufacturing company might produce a standard set of documents related to design, testing, and fabrication for each product it manufactures.

These documents might be created at the same time or in phases. The documents might be produced or reviewed by one person or by many people. All the documents might be the same format (such as Word documents). Alternatively, they might involve different file formats (for example, Word documents, OneNote notebooks, PowerPoint presentations, Visio diagrams, excel workbooks, and so on).

Document Sets can help organizations manage these situations more easily. The Document Set organizes multiple related documents into a single view where they can be worked on and managed as a single entity. When you create a new Document Set, you actually create a new content type. The content type becomes available across the site collection, and you can configure a new Document Set content type for each different multi-document work product.

When a Document Set content type is added to a library, users can create new instances of the Document Set in the same way that they create a single document.