XML Mapping with Content Controls in Word

Quick intro: My name is Travis Ratnam. I'm a program manager on the Word team by day and a professional magician by night… sort of like the guys in 'The Prestige.' I generally like to talk about escaping from straightjackets or making wild animals magically appear, but it's too early in the day for that.

What I really like to talk about today is mapping Content Controls and SharePoint properties via Word 2007's custom XML datastore—really no trickery here. The nice thing about this is that you can do a lot more with Word templates while spending less time managing redundancies around business process. Mapping SharePoint properties to Content Controls in Word 2007 allows you to push and pull data between the two applications with little if any client side code.

To do this, upload your Word template to your SharePoint Document Library and add Content Controls that are mapped to SharePoint properties. That's about it. Then, you can send out as many copies of this Word document and once you upload them back into SharePoint, the changes made to them will automatically propagate into your document library.

To show you what I mean, here's a quick video about mapping Content Controls to SharePoint properties. Below is a description of everything that's shown in the video. I'll be using the example of a real estate agent sending out contracts to his/her clients.

First | Create SharePoint Properties

You start by mapping Content Controls with SharePoint Properties from your Document Library. In our real estate example, we created a SharePoint Property labeled 'Buyer.'

Next | Map Content Controls

Next, you create a Word Template and upload it to your document library and insert Content Controls mapped to your SharePoint Properties. Notice in the example, below, the underlined section of our real estate contract is replaced with a content control labeled 'Buyer.

Finally | Show me the Mapping!

Now you can send out as many copies of this document to anyone you wish. In our real estate example, the real estate agent would email 'contracts' to the clients for them to fill out and send back.

The content controls can be filled out either in the Document Information Panel or in the Content Controls itself. You upload this back into SharePoint and the changes made to the content controls will propagate into the document library. See below:

The nice thing about this is, as you continue to populate your doc library, you won't have to open each and every Word document to pull out information from the content controls. You can view any information that is important to your business process, all at once. You can sort, filter and extract this information as well.

What I love about XML mapping is that you can edit directly in SharePoint and the changes automatically propagate back into its respective Word document. Look at this name change example:

As documents go through numerous iterations, we can actually keep track and moderate all of the changes being made to each document in your document library. Notice the name change below:

To conclude, XML mapping using content controls in Word and SharePoint properties can prove to be very useful for business processes that use Word Templates.

Later this week, another Word Program Manager Amani will be posting with more specifics on how to setup a document template to work with SharePoint. Thanks.

Travis Ratnam

Program Manager

Word | Office