Enabling Document Sets in the Content Type Gallery

Document Sets are one of the best things in SharePoint. They help you manage a set of documents which have more value together than separately. They also give you some great special capabilities beyond what a folder can provide:

• You can specify which Content Types are allowed in the Document Set
• The Document Set can be prepopulated with files
• Selected metadata values can be pushed to every document in the Document Set

All that said, Microsoft says they don’t see enough usage to justify investments in them. (See Chris McNulty‘s comment on my earlier post: Modernizing the Document Set `NewDocSet` Form.) To me, that’s a chicken and egg argument. Unless Microsoft finishes the job in modernizing Document Sets and then starts encouraging usage, that uptake is likely to stay low. Consultants like me know the value of Document Sets and use them all the time.

In fact, there are currently 22 feedback items in the SharePoint Feedback Hub having to do with Document Sets! That’s a lot for something no one is supposed to care about. “document set” · Community

Joanne Klein and I were talking about this yesterday. Document Sets are excellent containers for use with Purview-based labels and policies. This is especially true at the enterprise (tenant) level. Unfortunately, at least in some cases, Document Sets aren’t available as a Parent Content Type in the Content Type Gallery under Content Services in the SharePoint Admin Center. This is because Document Sets still require activation of a Site Collection Feature. Many people using SharePoint Online these days never worked with it in the old Feature days, so they may not have any idea these settings even exist.

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TIP: If you want your information architect(s) to be able to manage Content Types and Site Columns at the enterprise level, you don’t have to make them SharePoint Admins (which doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be – in many cases, it’s the right move. Instead, you can just give them Site Owner permissions on the old Content Type Hub site, which in most tenants is at /sites/ContentTypeHub.

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Unfortunately, along with many people not knowing about the value of Document Sets, there’s also misinformation out there, some even coming from Microsoft. As an example, there’s this post at answers.microsoft.com: SharePoint Online Document set not available in Content type gallery – Microsoft Community. There, the Microsoft person states:

The Document Set content types and some other content types are not available for the Content type gallery in the SharePoint admin center (at the organization level) and are only available for the site content type gallery (at the site level). This is by design. Previously, the content type publishing experience would add a copy of the content type to each site, but this had been changed by Microsoft.

This simply isn’t true!

If you want to use Document Sets at the enterprise level (and you should want to), there is an easy way to make them available. I believe that, in many cases, Document Sets are simply available for use in the Content Type Gallery without any action, so you may not be having any issues. It may have something to do with the age of the tenant or something, but I really don’t know.

Here’s how you enable Document Sets:

• Navigate to the Content Type Hub at /sites/ContentTypeHub
• Go to Gear / Site information / View all site settings
• On the settings page, click the Site collection features link. It’s in the section titled Site Collection Administration.

On the next page, you’ll see the available Site Collection Features. If the Document Sets feature is already Active, then this isn’t your issue. If it’s not active, simply click the Activate button and wait a few seconds for the page to refresh.

Voila! You can now use Document Sets at the tenant (enterprise) level.

If you try this and you still have issues, get in touch. No one should be prevented from using Document Sets!

Finally, you’ll need to activate the Document Sets feature in every site where you want to use Document Sets, even if you’re publishing Content Types which inherit from Document Set at the tenant level.