SharePoint

I was very pleased to receive the following notes from a participant in one of my recent SharePoint IA courses.

“This workshop is powerful and more than meets my expectations!  I wasn't sure if I should attend as I'm not a technical person, but am a member of the IT project team.  It is immediately applicable to my job.  I plan to share the information with the project team when I return to the office… I have already gained some excellent tools to work with each of the businesses as we migrate them to SharePoint 2010. “

This was wonderful feedback and it prodded me to try to distill what it was that attendees valued about the course.

This class pulls together a number of principles around information management strategy, process analysis, user research and taxonomy to guide development of key information architecture constructs in SharePoint.   All fine and good, but similar to standard IA approaches and not terribly exciting . Describing the course curriculum doesn’t really communicate  the value that students take away from the class.   So, I spent some time trying to think through the situations in which I have seen light bulbs go on. 

It’s in the structure of interactive exercises.   Students are given seemingly simple problems to solve, yet they yield deep insights.  Take a simple exercise around term derivation. (Used for populating the SharePoint term store.) 

I recently taught the Information Architecture for SharePoint class in Chicago.  Each time I teach this class, I gain more insights into how SharePoint content needs to be organized.  This last time, I had some new thoughts on how to consider a site map. 

I really enjoy teaching our new workshop on SharePoint Information Architecture (IA). There is nothing like teaching to further one’s own knowledge. The classes attract a diverse range of students. Some come knowing little about SharePoint or IA; others have expertise in either SharePoint or IA. The mix of knowledge in the class brings a wide range of issues to discussions and the class-dynamics and interaction lead to valuable new insights into SharePoint design, development and adoption.

Many organizations do not spend the time and make the effort to understand user requirements in detail.   And even when they do, they are often unable to translate requirements into effective content organizing principles, critical to successful SharePoint deployments.

I was really looking forward to attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA and the event didn’t disappoint.  Not only did I get to enjoy that southern California weather but I got the chance to get reacquainted with some old friends, meet some new people in the community and immerse myself in my favorite topic: enterprise search.

The number and range of session talks was staggering.  A few titles hit me right off of the bat as sessions I wanted to see:

• Creating Beautiful and Engaging Web Sites with SharePoint 2010
• Best Practices from the Field: Managing Corporate Metadata and Taxonomies with SharePoint 2010
• The Convergence of ECM and Knowledge Management: Strategies for Success

There were lots more, as well, so my days were pretty jam packed.  My most significant take-away from the conference was a general feeling of well-being as a result of learning that our approach to designing information architectures, taxonomies, and metadata schemas for SharePoint was exactly what Microsoft was advocating as best practice. 

It was also very interesting (and validating) that the song that we’ve been singing here at Earley & Associates for the last several years – that of Search as an Application – has become mainstream.  There were numerous sessions just on this topic, like:

I recently pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos’ 1995 What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting is how some of those predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

In “What Will Be” the term used to describe how people get their jobs done by leveraging various tools for managing documents and information was “Groupwork”.    Today, we simply use content management applications to get our jobs done.    See my recent blog, “This internet thing? It's gonna be BIG!” for more discussion on what will be, what is, and what is to come.

As I looked back over the last 15 years, I thought about the progress made in content management platforms; and the hype that accompanied each one.  “Now, we will we have an end to information chaos! We can control what goes where and enable easy access!”  Sadly, each new offering led to its own flavor of information chaos. 

So is SharePoint 2010 the platform that will solve the problem? Or, will we find that information chaos is migrated along with content?   It’s really up to you and your organization. The opportunity is there but don’t take it for granted.

As I talk to companies and other enterprises, I find that most fall into the same trap – they buy a tool, install it, roll it out and wait for their people to get more efficient and effective.  They wait… and wait… and…  Instead of things getting better, they actually can get worse. 

Why is this, I asked myself.   Here are the five things that came immediately to mind.

This week I have had the privilege of teaching the information organization and access (AIIM IOA) course at a combined meeting of the Joint Task Force North, The Dept of Homeland Security, The US Army North and the US Northern Command.

From the JTF site: “The Joint Task Force North http://www.jtfn.northcom.mil/ is the Department of Defense organization tasked to support our nation’s federal law enforcement agencies in the identification and interdiction of suspected transnational threats within and along the approaches to the continental United States. “

“Transnational threats are those activities conducted by individuals or groups that involve international terrorism, narcotrafficking, alien smuggling, weapons of mass destruction, and includes the delivery systems for such weapons that threaten the national security of the United States."

One of the primary goals of this mission is the capture and dissemination of knowledge throughout a network whose mission is the protection of the United States.  I was told by the head of the knowledge management organization, Dr Rick Morris, that my contribution would go directly to improving the security of the country.  I have to say that I am truly honored to be making such a contribution to our nation. 

Also from the JTF site: “JTF North’s homeland security support role is articulated in its mission statement:

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 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 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. 

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

Metadata represents the foundation for a large range of functionality across sites in SharePoint. The goal of metadata lies not in the tagging of content itself, but rather in the potential it offers for the improvement of findability via navigation. 

A new feature offered in SharePoint 2010 is Metadata Navigation, which provides users with navigational elements constructed from tags that have been applied by publishers to content. The purpose is to filter or refine the result set based on taxonomy that has been bound to Managed Metadata columns. 

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

The semantic enrichment of content through the application of metadata tagging is a critical activity in the creation of a well managed and usable information environment. There are a number of reasons why tagging is so important to enterprise information, including the enhancement of navigation (filtering/sorting mechanisms, guided navigation), improvement of search (relevancy, faceted search and best bets) and personalization (suggestions for related content, job role, location or department).

Tagging in SharePoint 2010 is approached from two perspectives, with the first originating from controlled vocabularies via Metadata Terms. Controlled terms are managed in a Term Set and surfaced as part of a document’s properties using the Managed Metadata column. The field itself is directly bound to a Term Set (or subset thereof), and enables users to easily browse available Terms for tagging. Important functionality appearing as part of the user interface includes:

"How many content types should you have?"

This is the question that came up in a conference call last week on SharePoint architecture. This organization had implemented their corporate portal on SharePoint 2007 and was interested in going forward with more portal sites but had some concerns about the approach to information architecture they had undertaken.

I answered what I would answer no matter what technology it was - "Only as many as you really need to implement the appropriate level of metadata, workflow and templates." Which is of course vague, as most good consultant-ese is. I followed up with some stats: when we work on web content management implementations, we typically end up with about 10-15 content types for a site of medium complexity. We always try to keep the structure simple and number of content types few for many good reasons, ranging from ease of content structure management to content publisher user experience.

The folks on the phone were quiet for a minute... You see, the previous consultant they had worked with had a bit of a different (read opposite) approach. The philosophy they described was that SharePoint content types should be created to the maximum degree of granularity (e.g. one content type per library) so as to reduce the need for content publishers to select a content type and tag metadata values. For example, if you had a site for human resources forms, you would have one library and content type for medical forms, one library and content type for dental forms, etc. Each content type would be extremely specific and require little tagging. "If you need 30,000 content types, then so be it" is the idea. (insert eye twitch.)

Since Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a mature platform for collaboration, content management and portals, companies can implement the package without much planning or even requirements gathering. Too often, the IT department is assigned the task of technically implementing SharePoint, with little context for its use or its potential value to the organization. The individuals in Business Units or Departments, who will use the system, are kept in the dark about the plans and the functionality of SharePoint. Once IT is satisfied that MOSS is technically stable, it rolls the package out to users with little training or follow-up. This approach rarely succeeds.