Unnie Ayilliath

Content organizer is a very handy feature available OOTB to route documents (or any file like aspx pages or html etc ) to a different location.This different location can be any of the following:

1. Different folder in the same library.
2. Different library in same site.
3. Different site .
4. Different site collection.

This post is all about how to leverage content organizer to route documents to different site collection in SharePoint online.

Target Site set up:

Open the target site collection/sub site and activate the Content Organizer Site feature.

Now you can see Content Organizer Settings and Content Organizer Rules options available on  your Site Settings page.

Also you can see that a new library called Drop Off Library is created in the site.

Click on Content Organizer Settings and configure the settings as below:

1. Allow rules to specify another site as a target location : Check this option as it allows to send content to other sites.
2. Folder Partitioning : This is optional, if you select this option the automatically the target location documents will partitioned into sub folders which can prevent the target library reaching threshold limits. You can specify what is the maximum number of documents per folder and also the naming convention of the folders.

3. Duplicate submissions: Two options are available here:

• Use SharePoint Versioning: Same file name will override the existing file.
• Append unique characters to end of same file name: No file overriding

4. Preserve Context: Check this option if you want to preserve the original document properties like created by , time and other custom metadata. Custom metadata is preserved only if the Drop  off Library has the content type of the incoming document added to it before hand.

5. Rule Managers: This section enables you to configure notifications for below events.

• E-mail rule managers when submissions do not match a rule.
• E-mail rule managers when content has been left in the Drop Off Library.

You can configure who gets email and when the email should be triggered.

6. Submission Points: This is basically a web service endpoint url for this site collection. If other sites or systems needs to send content to this site collection , it should use this url. The basic format for this url is : https://targetsiteurl/_vti_bin/OfficialFile.asmx

SharePoint Admin Center Settings:

1. Open  SharePoint Admin center and click on records management section.
2. Create a New Connection.Important thing here is to fill the Send To URL value that of the Submission Point URL of the target site collection.(https://targetsiteurl/_vti_bin/OfficialFile.asmx).
3. Check  Allow manual submission from the Send To menu if you want users to have the option to manually trigger the routing from any document library.
4. Below are the main routing options available:

• Copy : Copies over the document. source & Target will have different copies of same document.
• Move: Moves the document from source to target. source will no longer have any trace of that document.
• Move and Leave a link: Moves the document from source to target and leaves a link to the new document location.

5. Click Add Connection to create the routing connection.

Now your routing connection is set up and you can go to any SharePoint site in your tenant and go to any library , select a document –> in Files Tab, click on Send To. Here you can see the connection which you have just created.

Click on your connection name, it will prompt you for confirmation and copies the document and present you with the link to the copied document. The document is always copied to a automatically created “Drop Off Library” in the target site collection.

Other relevant link about this topic:  Microsoft support post about Content Organizer