Blogs

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

Search is typically thought of as a black box, with functionality that is commonly misunderstood by most users. People often turn to search as a result of a breakdown in information architecture, and tend to have high expectations based on experience gained outside the organization through the use of technologies such as Google. Unfortunately, inside the firewall, search quite often develops into more of a random document generator than a useful tool, as heaps of unstructured content are crawled and added to the index. The catch here is that the development and application of good taxonomy to content is a prerequisite, foundational element of good enterprise search. 

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 third in a ten-part series on Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

Social technologies in the enterprise are becoming a key enabler for establishing common connections between employees with similar interests, resulting in increased levels of innovation through knowledge exchange and information transfer. A large part of the functionality offered by SharePoint 2010 revolves around the idea of social collaboration in the enterprise through blogs, wikis, content syndication, discussions and social tagging. 

While the first approach to tagging in SharePoint 2010 originates from controlled vocabularies, the second approach comes to us via uncontrolled terms that are managed as part of a flat list and surfaced in a document’s properties through the Managed Keywords column. The intention is to enable users to apply terminology to content as metadata in a folksonomic way that make sense to them. Rather than a forced selection from a more controlled taxonomic list of values, users are provided the ability to enter their own descriptors. Like Managed Metadata, auto-suggest is offered to provide insight into managed terminology already defined in the taxonomy. Tags applied to content can then be surfaced as navigation through the addition of the Tag Cloud web part.

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:

As a follow up to last week’s guest post on AIIM’s Digital Landfill blog and the official launch of SharePoint 2010 only weeks away (May 12 at 11 a.m. EST), I thought I’d take some time and put together a series of posts that dig into further detail around each of the 8 things you need to know about taxonomy, metadata and information architecture in SharePoint 2010. Topics in the will series include: 

• Using Taxonomy & Controlled Vocabularies for Content Enrichment 
• Using Social Features for Personal Classification & Improved Findability 
• Using Taxonomy & Metadata to Improve Navigation & Browsing 
• Using Taxonomy and Metadata to Improve Search and Discovery 
• Sharing Content Types Across Site Collections 
• Using Retention Stages to Manage the Information Lifecycle 
• Administering Taxonomy Using Term Store Management 
• Importing Taxonomy Using the Managed Metadata Import File
• Series Summary

Taxonomy consultants, such as those at Earley & Associates, may be the ones who develop a taxonomy for an organization, but the organization's own staff will ultimately be responsible for maintaining it, so the question arises what tool or tools should be used the maintain that taxonomy and perhaps further develop it. A taxonomy may be implemented in a CMS, in SharePoint, or with search (Google Search Appliance, FAST, etc.), but these systems do not have taxonomy management components.

An interest in taxonomy tools was evident by the number of chat-based questions that my colleague Seth Maislin and I received from participants in this week’s Taxonomy Community of Practice Call, Cross-Mapping Taxonomies, which we jointly presented. There is a need for tools that do more than merely enabling manual adding and deleting of terms. Mapping two taxonomies is something that only a few tools support, but there are many other day-to-day taxonomy management activities that also require specialized taxonomy management software.

This week several Earley & Associates consultants, including myself, participated in a special training on Smartlogic Ontology Manager, a good example of full-featured taxonomy management software. The question arises:  is this taxonomy management or ontology management software?

If we look at competing software products, we see various designations:

What format should I be publishing my content in? This is a question we come across a lot in our work. Business documents exist in a wide variety of formats from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF to web content and everything in between. As publishing models continue to evolve, distributed authorship capabilities are increasingly being offered to a wider, more disparate set of business users. This decentralized approach, while pushing document management directly into the hands of business owners, also supports its rapid publication and delivery to consumers.

We all know that metadata can be a challenge, especially in Digital Asset Management (DAM) contexts, where metadata is the only thing making those assets searchable and reusable. To all those who work with data architecture, content management, search or taxonomies for Digital Asset Management, we'd love to hear from you...

Earley & Associates has put together an industry research survey on organizational maturity and its correlation with metadata and information development best practices.

What do you get in return? Take the survey now and receive free passes to the webinar where we will review survey results and an upcoming Taxonomy Community of Practice webinar (a $100 value).

On a roll and want to yell from the rooftops about your frustrations? Take this short poll from CMSWire on your biggest DAM challenge.

Our second session of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Jumpstart series will address creative workflows and marketing resource management. The following post from speaker Ralph Windsor of Daydream describes the problems organizations face without effective metadata strategies in place to manage marketing communications:

After a decision has been made to invest into DAM or MRM solutions and the system has been introduced, one of the realisations that many marketers run into is that old IS maxim, “Garbage In Garbage Out”.

First, staff begin amassing marcomms collateral with the intention of uploading it. Then there is the next job to consider: who will carry out the cataloguing work so we can all find it? At this point, enthusiasm amongst most creative and marketing personnel begins to wane and so also their motivation to complete the cataloguing work effectively.

To get through the ever growing mountain of collateral produced by the business, metadata entry and management tasks may be passed down to inexperienced juniors or carried out at high speed to ensure that assets are available on the system - where everyone just assumes their colleagues will be able to find them because they are 'on the system'.

With the benefit of hindsight though many DAM projects, and even more business cases, the most profound lesson I’ve learned is akin to ‘money can’t buy you love’. The business case must be more than just a tool to fund your project. There’s both the ROI aspect and strategic rationale.

The gains firms realize from DAM derive from fundamental changes to business processes, in an environment of complex, highly variable workflows. While DAM systems enable these improved processes, the organizational support required to make these transitions is the crucial factor in how quickly the gains from DAM are realized. Yep, we have to figure out exactly how those users should use the system, then make sure they do it.

The presentation of the business case if often the best opportunity to secure this level of support from the right people. Teams often narrowly focus on ROI achieved through cost savings, to narrowly focus on securing funding for the DAM system implementation. The big gains, and typically what’s really behind a firm’s interest in DAM, are strategic and eventually drive increased revenues. Cogent, visually-depicted business cases often become the master from which project “marketing” is derived – whether securing funding for system implementation projects, fostering executive sponsorship support or marshalling the numerous resources that make the transition to new, improved business processes actually come true.