Document Sets with SharePoint 2010 Online - Office 365

Document Sets is a newly introduced feature at SharePoint 2010. Document Sets enables you to create and manage multiple documents or files in a single deliverable format. By design Document Sets is a Content Type but the way it looks and works is just like a folder with lots of features. In terms of functionality it is in between the Document Workspace and folders.

In Office 365 we can find Document Sets feature under enterprise plans. Unfortunately "Professionals and Small Businesses" plan does not come with Document Sets feature.

 Document Sets is a Feature and needs to be activated at site collection level. In order to activate Document Sets Feature at site collection level we need to navigate to the top level site and go to Site Actions -> Site Settings ->  Site collection Features under Site Collection Administration

Then activate the Document Sets Feature. Once we have done that we can see the Document Sets option in the SharePoint document libraries. We don’t need to do same settings at the site level since this is a Site Collection feature.

We can now go to any document library in our sit, select Documents from the ribbon bar and click the arrow at "New Document", and select "Document Set"

After giving a name and description to our Document Set, it gets created. As seen in the screen shot below, we can view/edit the document set's properties. In the edit property screen we can see the Document Set is actually a content type.

We can upload documents into the document sets as we are uploading a document to a document library.

 Here we got our Document Set "Corporate Meeting" with individual files in it.

We can also set the metadata for Document Set and all the documents in the Document Set gets the same metadata. It is also possible to run workflow on the document set itself instead of running it on each different file.