Windows File Classification Infrastructure Integration with SharePoint

File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) is a part of Windows File System Resource Manager available on Windows Server 2008 R2 that allows managing and tagging files on the file system with custom metadata. Tagging files on the file system and making the tags available for browsing and for search provides a great alternative to full scale content management systems like SharePoint. The tagging in FCI becomes even more useful because administrators could define the set of custom properties, their data types like string or boolean and even potential values for users to select from.

We at MetaVis Technologies realized that it will be interesting to implement a robust integration solution that will connect files managed by FCI with SharePoint libraries. With such a solution the files managed by FCI will not be locked in FCI but could be reused by company portals and workflows along with the same metadata collected by users on the file system using familiar Windows Explorer interface.

FCI use starts with File Server Resource Manager Classification Management area. There, in Classification Properties tab page we created a String custom property Vendor.

This is how Vendor property is defined in the property definition dialog which is similar to the SharePoint field definition screen.

Then we define an FCI rule that instructs FCI to assign value abs to the Vendor field of all files in a certain folder.

This is how the screen with rule definition looks like.

 Execute the rule – and all files in the selected folder become tagged with Vendor property with the assigned abc value.

We can now select some files tagged with our new field in a folder managed by FCI and copy them to the clipboard in Windows Explorer

After this we can paste these files into a SharePoint list in MetaVis Migrator navigation tree.

We can observe that Vendor field is now present on the properties mapping screen on the MetaVis Migrator Copy Wizard:

In our example we will map this Vendor field to the SharePoint library default Title field so that value abc that we assigned using FCI rule will be copied to Title field of the document uploaded into SharePoint library. We can specify values for other properties as well.

Finally, here is our document in SharePoint library with Title field value copied from Vendor field which, in turn, was created and populated by File Classification Infrastructure engine.

Tags: classification, copy, fci, field, file, file system, import, infrastructure, metadata, metavis, sharepoint, upload