Jeff Carr's blog

[This post originally appeared on DigitalLandfill.com on August 25, 2011.  It has also been included in AIIM's Governance in SharePoint Toolkit which is available free to Professional Members or $99 to others.  Use coupon code PROMEMX2 to extend your membership through December 2012 when you upgrade to Professional for $139.]

Many organizations are finding that leveraging the full suite of capabilities SharePoint offers requires introduction of a new requirement – that of dealing with, managing and exploiting taxonomies.  Of course taxonomies are not new, but there is some confusion about where managed metadata services and the term store end and true taxonomy management begins.  There are also some misconceptions about the process of deriving and applying taxonomies in SharePoint.  The following are five areas of confusion that we have seen in our engagements and research. 

Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Scott Abel (@scottabel), the Content Wrangler himself, on the topic of search engine optimization, or SEO. The purpose of SEO is to drive targeted traffic to a website from search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. It‘s a multi-faceted discipline that requires development of a strategy to ensure success and it’s important that activities like keyword research be integrated directly into content authoring processes.

Scott and I discussed key considerations for optimizing organic website visibility and we walked through an example of potential opportunity lost when a site fails to obtain a high ranking for a specific keyword. The webinar provided the more than 160 attendees with practical and useful information that can be used to kick start any SEO program. Feedback was great and many questions were asked including: 

Question: What are your thoughts on long-tail keyword searches?

In Information Overload and Improving Intranet Findability, we talked about overcoming challenges around our ability to filter through the copious amounts of data that we’re confronted with on a daily basis inside our organizations. Expanding on that topic, let’s now take a look at it from a much broader perspective, one that extends out beyond the firewall and into the digital realm of the Internet itself.  

In this day and age it’s easy to publish content online. Anyone can do it and the ease with which it can be done has resulted in a massive explosion of digital data, which some expect to surpass an estimated 988 EB (exabyte) this year. The sheer volume of information is inconceivable, let alone challenges encountered overcoming difficulties in our attempts to both find and be found online.

In the first part of this article I defined governance and discussed some of the key elements in designing a governance plan. For many organizations, the plan to migrate to SharePoint 2010 will require at a minimum a refresh if not complete redesign of existing information architectures. The relative newness of the platform means this is an opportune time to define and carefully plan exactly what the information landscape needs to be. Migration in and of itself should not be seen strictly as a means to acquire new capability, but rather as a suitable time to (re)design and implement foundational information management structures out of the gate. 

SharePoint is a technology rich in capability with an inherent nature to decentralize document and content management from the information technology function. It’s a platform with much promise that, simply put, places increased levels of power and autonomy into the hands of business users. On the surface, it seems like a valid approach because it’s difficult to find fault in letting those who understand the business best manage the information assets they create. The primary problem with that tactic, however, lies in the fact that many organizations lack both standard content management methods and expertise in the application of best practices across areas such as information architecture (IA), taxonomy, metadata and search. 

How Setting It Up And "Getting It Out There" Is Not A Strategy

Why do you use SharePoint? On the surface this might seem like a relatively simple question. In all likelihood, I’m sure you are able to list off a handful of reasons that include everything from business collaboration and document management to business intelligence and enterprise search. However, if you take a moment to look past the functional capabilities of the product itself and step back to carefully consider exactly why you are employing its use, what might the answer be then? If a detailed and specific reason is not immediately apparent this should be cause for concern. 

The “Technology First” Approach for SharePoint Implementation

A common approach for many organizations has been one of technology centered design - that is, to start with the technology first and push off the gathering and documentation of requirements until later, if at all. It is often left up to the folks responsible for the IT function to set it up and get it out there and, as business users slowly become aware of its existence, a site or two are often provisioned for them to “play around” with. Initial sites are then followed by a few more and even more after that, and in what seems like the blink of the eye, an assortment of individuals and groups from across the organization have started to turn on various bits of functionality and deploy the product in a haphazard and confusing way.

Note: This article has also been published in full on CMSWire.

Web search is something that most of us take for granted. It’s a split second operation that offers up page after page of results for what seem like an infinite number of topics. For any particular query, if we don’t immediately see a result that catches our eye, our ability to reformulate and execute a new search takes but a moment. With Google, we assume that the items listed on the first page of results - or first few pages for that matter - are the most relevant for the search query we entered and why shouldn’t we, with such a complex algorithm and thousands of intelligent people working to solve a single problem, this market leader has set the standard when it comes to connecting people with information.

On occasion however, we find ourselves conducting search after search and end up spending more time than expected trying to find a document that best matches our original query. In such cases we often accept the results we’re given and conclude that an appropriate resource to what we’re looking for must not exist or cannot be found online. While the search results are typically good enough to get us what we need, there is always some room for improvement when it comes to filtering and refinement.

In this month's article on information agility (via CMSWire) we take a look at the so-called problem of information overload and how the real challenge lies in creating appropriate filters that improve findability. 

Information management agility is about being able to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. But what if there's just so much information that we are caught in a battle trying to find the things that are relevant to achieve our goals? There is a way to get past this information overload and improve findability.

We’ve been hearing about the problem of information overload for years now. The exponential growth of information within our organizations is deemed as so problematic that it negatively affects employee productivity and ultimately results in increased levels of operational costs as a result of an inability to easily sift through it all.

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.

In this article (originally published 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.