Blogs

The rules of the game are changing, and they’re changing faster than ever before. With more than a billion users now online, every minute of every day millions of people participate in online conversations that take place across a multitude of social networking sites, blogs, discussion forums, wikis and topical communities. Included is the exchange of information and opinion around well thought out and researched articles, shorter more concisely written blog posts or 140 character tweets on services like Twitter, plus everything in between.

The collaborative architecture of today’s social technology has rapidly become a key enabler in providing users with the capability to publish any thought, idea, feeling or opinion on any topic at any time, for free. As a consequence of the inherent nature of these participatory social systems, average users have gained an increasingly higher level of leverage due to the ease with which their perspectives can be virally spread from person to person and community to community with little or no effort required on their part. As the number of users continue to grow, so too will their involvement, further compounding the already exponential growth of information being generated.

In this article (via CMSWire) we take a look at approaches to developing strategies for participation in social media from the perspective of the enterprise.

Search is an incredibly interesting problem, one that’s so complex in the background yet so simple on the surface. What can't we just get Google is a common question asked during many of our intranet redesign initiatives. We hear it from end-users on the frontlines all the way up to senior level management, executives and everywhere in between.

In this two part article (via CMSWire) we examine the desire to duplicate the Google experience in the enterprise by attempting to change our perspective on what we expect from enterprise search based on what we’re willing to do to make it work. 

• Enterprise Search and Pursuit of the Google Experience (Part 1)
• Enterprise Search and Pursuit of the Google Experience (Part 2)

Clink, clink went two halves of a Japanese rifle shell case on my researcher's desk at the National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park, Maryland. They fell from the envelope attached to a memorandum in the folder I took from the large, archival documents box belonging RG-319, Office of Assistant Secretary, Army Staff Operations. The memorandum discussed problems associated with placing Imperial Japanese Army rifles under U.S. Army control back into service as part of the mobilization effort in Japan in response to rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula between 1948 and 1950. It was a good plan except: 1) the parts of the Japanese rifles were hand-crafted by each soldier during final assembly at time of issue and were unique and therefore the guns lacked interchangeable replacement parts; 2) the shells were designed for the gun bore, and 3) the US military had no practical means to mass produce shells for these archaic weapons.

This story illustrates a number of important points. A theory requires supporting knowledge to establish its actual goodness. Knowledge is a work product that moves through an organization. The repository for a work product artifact can be in an unusual place. Navigating to that place requires both an external structure and a diligent, informed seeker. Once accessed, retrieval results may include both target and unanticipated, serendipitous materials.

Taxonomists never work in isolation: they collaborate with subject matter experts, content managers, systems integrators, information architects, and webmasters, among others. One type of professional whose area of expertise requires close work with taxonomists is usability or user experience professionals. Quite simply, usability professionals design user interfaces to software, websites, and information services, among other products and services, to make them easier to use. Since the objective of a taxonomy is to help users find information, and user professionals’ goal is to help users achieve their tasks and goals, there is obviously some overlap.

Experienced taxonomists are already familiar with usability issues, and usability professionals who work on website or online information systems usually have some familiarity with taxonomy. But each may not have full expertise in the other’s field, and thus it makes sense to collaborate.

Taxonomists and usability experts not only collaborate to achieve better results, but they can also learn from each other. I recently found this to be the case when I attended the UPA Boston Ninth annual Mini Conference on June 9. “Mini” is hardly the name for it, with 450 attendees, 32 speakers in four simultaneous tracks of sessions. Yet I was the only taxonomist among the hundreds of user interface designers, usability engineers, user experience experts, and the like.

What Usability Experts Can Learn About Taxonomies

Information professionals interested in taxonomies now have another conference, besides Information Today’s Taxonomy Boot Camp, that has numerous taxonomy sessions. This is the annual conference, usually in June, of the professional association SLA (Special Libraries Association). I attended this year’s conference for the first time, which was held in New Orleans, June 13-16, and was quite impressed with its taxonomy-focused sessions and networking opportunities.

Although there is no professional association dedicated just to taxonomists, the new Taxonomy Division of SLA has begun to change that. SLA is the leading international association of library and information professionals working corporate settings, government, nonprofits, and educational institutions with specialized research and information management needs. Until recently, its Knowledge Management Division came closest to serving the interests of taxonomists, but since August 2009, those engaged in taxonomy work now have their own group within the association. The SLA annual conference in June this year was thus the first that the Taxonomy Division was able to sponsor sessions, and it did in a big way. In the past, SLA included only a pre-conference workshop and perhaps a single session on taxonomies, but this time the two and a half days of regular sessions was filled with taxonomy-related programs in every time-slot and one time with conflicting taxonomy sessions.

This is the final post in a ten-part series on Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

Our enterprise systems themselves are only able to take us so far, and it’s crucial to be cognizant of the fact that there’s still a lot of outside work that needs to be done. The underlying foundation required to leverage our technological capability is derived from the establishment of strong publishing models, standard workflow processes, corporate governance, continuous taxonomy management and well trained users that have been included as key stakeholders throughout the design process. 

The many great features and functionality offered as part of the SharePoint 2010 platform are sure to provide the foundation for better management of information in the organization. Even with the introduction of the Term Store Management Tool and many of the other areas discussed in this series, it’s important to return to the beginning and remind ourselves that SharePoint itself, at least at this point in time, is not intended nor should it be perceived as an enterprise-wide taxonomy management tool. SharePoint 2010 still lacks functionality in a number of key areas, such as the ability to perform auto-categorization and the management of complex relationships between terms. 

This post is the ninth in a ten-part series on Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

Taxonomy managed in another tool outside of the SharePoint environment may be imported into SharePoint 2010. Although Terms and Term Sets can be created manually using the functionality provided by the Term Store Management Tool, a significantly simpler approach to taxonomy creation is through importation. 

Term Sets can be imported into existing Groups by Taxonomy Managers using the Managed Metadata Import File, which is a comma delimited document in standard UTF-8 CSV file format. The basic file contains the six types of metadata fields defined below. 

This post is the eighth in a ten-part series on Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

Now that we’ve developed a fairly solid understanding of the importance of taxonomy as it relates to information management and the user experience, let’s take a look at how it’s administered. Taxonomy management in SharePoint 2010 sees a significant improvement over functionality offered by the product’s predecessors.

First and foremost is the creation of a term store repository, enabling centralized vocabulary management applicable across site collections. Management of taxonomy takes place within the Term Store Management Tool, which is accessible through either Central Administration or Site Administration. Basic functionality provided for the management of taxonomy includes:

This post is the seventh in a ten-part series on Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

With hundreds or thousands of employees generating information on a daily basis, there’s bound to be a buildup of ROT (content that is “Redundant, Outdated or Trivial”). When left unattended, this content can quickly evolve into a negative user experience, particularly in search as users are forced to sift through pages of irrelevant results. Automating processes that address the review, archival and/or disposition of information in the organization on a regularly scheduled basis can ensure both the relevance and timeliness of information.

The implementation of retention schedules in SharePoint 2010 can be associated with specific types of content through the application of information management policies. Retention Stages are defined within the settings for a content type. 

This post is the sixth in a ten-part series on Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

Working through the process of developing an enterprise information management strategy uncovers elements common across the organization. These commonalities should result in the establishment of a set of core content types, each with a standard set of metadata attributes. A fundamental challenge faced by organizations with respect to specifying content types and metadata in earlier versions of SharePoint has been the inability to easily repurpose or reuse them across site collections.

Because site collections have represented fairly strict boundaries, most organizations have been forced to design and build custom solutions to get around this problem. Synchronization of content types and metadata across site collections required them to be copied or updated to each site collection, either manually by an administrator or programmatically through workarounds to the system itself.