Forum Discussion
Advanced Document Management System (DMS) for sharepoint ?
maxwell888
What kind of advanced DMS functionality are you looking for? e.g. Records management, metadata support, metadata versioning, ...
Paul | SLIM Applications
Not the OP, but enforcement of required fields is a big one. They have moved away from this and it is causing more problems than it solved.
PhoenixMS You may consider a power automate flow to check for mandatory metadata. Trigger it on New and/or Edit events.
Sure some clever person can do the same as that indicator: missing metadata. Or maybe extract it value true or false.
Run a weekly check flow for the administrators, and send an alert to the EditedBy.Agree, support for required metadata fields is indeed limited. There are also no major improvements to be expected from the https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=SharePoint&searchterms=metadata.
However, improving the handling of required metadata is not listed. There are several 3rd party solutions that offer the capability to select content types and set custom metadata. They can also automatically extract properties from files (e.g. keywords from PDF files, GPS coordinates jpg files, EXIF metadata from images, ..) and capture the values into SharePoint columns.
Overall I think the SharePoint platform provides great functionality (search, scalability, integration Office, multiple devices, ..) but it is weak in areas like RM and metadata compared to other DMS solutions. They are also working on promising AI solutions (e.g. Project Cortex).
If the metadata functionality is a key component in your ECM strategy then you may to have to consider moving to another DMS solution or use an interim solution (e.g. https://www.slimapplications.com/product/explorer/) to address the functionality gaps on the current platform.
Paul | SLIM Applications
