Route Uploaded Documents In SharePoint Using Content Organizer Rules

Records Management is one of the primary utilities of SharePoint as an Enterprise Content Management System. One of the out of the box features of SharePoint that supports record management is being able to use a predefined Record Center Site Collection template. Record center serves as the central location, where the organization can store and manage its documents.

The Records Center site template helps in creating a pre-defined site, which has been specifically modified for record management and retention. You can see how to create a Record Center from here. By default Record Center will have the record management features enabled by default which makes it different from other templates like Team Site. In this article we will see how to work with Document Routing using Content Organizer which is a great feature of Record Center template.

Pre-requisites

We will need a destination library, to where we will route the uploaded documents conditionally depending on the document’s metadata.

Once the document is created, ensure that we have the Content Organizer Rules section in Site Settings-> Site Administration.

If we are using Record Center Template, it will be automatically present as Content Organizer feature is activated by default. If it is not present, enable the Site Feature named Content Organizer.

Once activated, it will give us the Content Organizer section.

Going to the Site Contents, we can see a new document library named Drop Off Library has been  added.

Set up Content Organizer Rule

We can start setting up document routing by going to Site Settings-> Content Organizer Rules. Select new item from the below library.

Specify the Rule Name, Rule Status, and Priority. We will have to associate a Content Type with the rule as the routing will be based on Content Type as well as an optional filtering condition. Currently, we will go with Document Content Type.

Now, let’s add the extra filtering condition because we don’t have to route all Documents that match the Document Content Type in the destination Library. We will only route documents whose title matches ‘Year End Finance’. This way, only the required documents are routed to the destination library.

Finally, we have to set the target location where the document has to be routed to. Select "Browse" and set the destination library.

Thus, we have created the Content Organizer rule that will route the document with title ‘Year End Finance’ to the destination library.

Test Content Organizer Rule

Now, let’s test the document routing capability. Go to the Drop Off library that gets created when we activate the Content Organizer Site feature, and upload a document here.

From ‘Choose File,’ browse to the required document and click on OK.

This will upload the document to the library.

We have to update the metadata properties for the library. Specify the title as "Year End Finance" and click on "Submit".

This will kick start the Content Organizer Rule and route the document to the Destination Library.

Going to the Destination Library, we can see that the document has reached here despite uploading it to the Drop Off Library.

Now, let’s try to upload a document without the Title ‘Year End Finance’ and see what happens.

We have kept the title field blank in this case.

We get the message that the document has been submitted successfully but it has not been routed to the destination library as no Content Organizer Rule was matched. This is because the metadata Title is not set to ‘Year End Finance’.

We can see that the document is still back there in the Drop Off Library.

Let’s go ahead and edit the properties of this document.

We will set the title to ‘Year End Finance’.

Clicking on "Submit" has triggered the Content Organizer Rule and the document is routed to the Destination Library successfully.

Going to the Destination Library, we can see that both the documents are present here.

Summary

Thus, we saw how to use Content Organizer to route an uploaded document to a destination library based on a rule.