Content Organizer Works Intermittently

[Nicholas Case]

I have a problem with the Content Organizer feature in SharePoint Online where sometimes the rules are applied correctly and documents are properly routed while other times they just remain stuck in the Drop Off Library. All rules point to the same document library and they are all very similar and route based upon the same managed metadata field. See the attached screen shot for the properties of the rule. I have approximately 500 rules as there is one for each client folder. The destination library has approximately 35,000 items in it. When I go to save a document I get the "Something Went Wrong" message and a correlation ID.

I have spent hours with the phone support people for Office 365 over multiple sessions and they have no clue how to fix this. The internal reference number for this case is 30126-5387972, which may be helpful to the Microsoft employees on here. The phone reps have blammed this on eveything from general service degredation to having too many rules or too many files in the destination document library. Eveytime they have a different guess, but never an acutal answer or explanation.

Basically the problem is this:

I have rules set up like this where the document is routed based upon the value of a managed metadata tag.

Next I complete the required metadata tags and submit the document.

SharePoint thinks for a bit and then gives me this message.

The document then sits in the Drop Off Library forever. It does not work with the nightly timer job either. I get the same results with different browsers. When saving through the Microsoft Office client application I do not get an error message, but the document stays in the Drop Off Library.

All of this only happens sometimes. Other times the rules work and the document is correclty routed. There appears to be no differentiation between rules that work and those that don't. I have tried rebuilding the rules, rebuilding the destination folders, and I have deactivated and reactivated the content organizer, but nothing has worked. I am at a loss. Hopefully someone can help.

[#2]

Time to open a support ticket so Microsoft can dig into your specific problem in the farm where your SPO tenant lives...it's difficult to figure out from here what the root cause of the problem can be. It could also be something related to your particular SPO implementation if you are using custom document libraries as destination for the content organizer

[#3]

Any idea how to open a support ticket? I thought I did that by dealing with them over the phone, but after several hours the rep simply gave up and said I need to try and resolve this through the forums.

[#4]

That answer from support is absoultely unprofessional...since this issue relies on the backend, they are the ones that have to help you with this issue so I think you need to insist

[#5]

Second that.

I've run into this a time or two before, often resolved by just deleting and re-adding the document, or deleting and re-adding the rule.

Haven't delved into it deeply, but I always suspected it had something to do with using the Managed Metadata field in the rule. Any time I have seen it, using simple Choice fields allowed it to work fine, but the hangups were typically using the Managed Metadata field.

[#6]

Did you ever resolve this issue? Can you please post the resolution?

[#7]

Hi Nicholas,

This isn't a proposed solution to the problem, but rather an option for reducing the complexity of your solution, such that MS can't blame you :)

Look into the setting just below the target library. If you're OK with the folder name being exactly the value of the AWMI Household column value, then you could technically get away with a single rule:

1. Remove the Property-based condition (don't need it)
2. Set the Destination to the root of the library
3. Check the box labeled Automatically create a folder for each unique value of a property
4. Choose AWMI Household in the dropdown labeled Select a property
5. Specify the format as %2
6. Upload and tag a document to test the results

One last thought: It appears that you've renamed the Content Type column to AWMI Document (where Invoices shows in your screenshot). Is that the case?

This is generally a bad idea because not all developers refer to the column by its Internal name so changing the Display name might have unintended consequences (especially for such an important column).

Mahalo