11.7. Summary

Managing the document lifecycle depends on metadata. Content types are the way to manage metadata within SharePoint. You can encapsulate document metadata by combining it with custom behaviors implemented in content type event receivers. You then use those custom behaviors to control all aspects of the document creation and revision phases. Constructing reusable libraries of document-specific components can greatly simplify the task of building document management solutions.

You can extend the notion of encapsulation to include high-level document management policies declared using XML. First you create a custom document management policy schema and then use it to create a default set of policies for your content type. Using the Windows SharePoint Services object model, you can attach a default policy to the content type at runtime and then retrieve it, using XML deserialization, to process the policy against individual document items. Finally, you can extend the stsadm command line tool with custom commands specific to your document management solution.