Question about Displaying Documents and the CQWP in MOSS 2007

Question

My organization is in the process of converting our intranet over to a SharePoint solution. Part of this intranet will be the movement and organization of all our internal documents. Currently, we have 11 pages of document links, each with its own subheadings.

So far I have it set where each document has a custom field called "Page" with a check box list of all the document pages on the intranet site. On each individual page, I have setup a Content Query Web Part that displays the documents that have the corresponding Page value set (i.e. if a document Page value has been checked for "HR" it will appear on the HR page). The goal of this setup is to allow the nontechnical personal who will be responsible for the maintenance of the documents to be able to upload new documents to the documents list and note on which pages they should appear on without having to manually update the pages themselves.

The problem that I am having is that I cannot seem to find a good way to sort the documents into their subheadings once they are on the appropriate page. I could create individual check boxes for each page/subheading combination, but this would create a list of approximately 50-75 items. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I could accomplish this, either via CQWP or by different means?

Goals/Requirements of Installation

• Allow Intranet documents to be maintained by nontechnical personnel
• Display documents on the appropriate pages without user having to edit actual page or web part
• Denote document page location using user settable document attributes (if possible)
• Maintain current intranet organization and workflow
• Use only one document list without subdirectories

NOTE: I am aware that this is not the most efficient or elegant way to do things, but these are the requirements I have been given for the project.

NOTE2: It's also entirely possible that I am going about this the entirely wrong way (I'm new to SharePoint). If anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it. I'll also provide any clarification that anyone needs.

Answer 1

Rather than indicating where the documents should be displayed, create columns for the document that indicate what the documents are (Content Types) or about (metadata). Then your pages can display things based on the characteristics of the document rather than where someone thought the document should go.

This is a better answer for many, many reasons, but the primary ones are scalability and advancement of enterprise taxonomy.

Answer 2

Further to Marc's answer about creating custom content types, you could also add the 'target audiences' site column to that content type. This would allow you to target specific documents at specific 'audiences' that you have created. You could have, say, a HR audience which is based off the Department user profile property, or just to get you started hardcode the value 'HR'. Then add the audience to the HR document site column (b/c this document is now based off your new content type you just created). Lastly add the audience to the CQWP.