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SharePoint Consulting Services

We have developed 6 service offerings to help organizations succeed with SharePoint from an enterprise-wide perspective, ensuring findability of content through effective document tagging, metadata management, and search.

SharePoint Assessment: Technology & Information Architecture

If you're considering SharePoint for your organization, migrating to a new version, or simply want to improve your existing implementation, our three-week assessment service will help you make the right decisions. Our consultants will come onsite and conduct interviews and facilitated sessions to understand your needs and challenges around both the technology and your content. The final deliverable is an Assessment Report that is tailored to your issues and can include, but is not limited to, the following:

  • A review of your needs and information about your organization pertinent to the SharePoint implementation
  • An evaluation of your information architecture (search, metadata, taxonomy, UI) needs and challenges
  • Our recommendations for implementing SharePoint, from a content and technology perspective
  • High-level licensing requirements and costs associated with both software and services. 

SharePoint Strategy

Align business needs with SharePoint functionality, prioritize resources and develop actionable plans for implementation. Align team members across departments with a unified SP vision for the organization, and translate that vision into detailed functional requirements for budgeting, planning and development  purposes. Deliverables can include:

  • Current state assessment & gap analysis
  • Application review
  • Content inventory & audit
  • Implementation roadmap
  • Use cases & personas
  • Governance

SharePoint Design (Information Architecture, Workflow, UI)

SharePoint has a particular set of challenges related to usability and findability, given the vast amounts of information that ends up in sites and libraries. We can help you design a successful SharePoint information architecture and user interface to best leverage taxonomy and metadata and make your content easier to find and use. The deliverables can include:

  • Use cases & personas
  • Content architecture (content types, metadata requirements)
  • Taxonomy
  • Search configuration recommendations (best bets, thesaurus, search UI)
  • Wireframes
  • Workflow design
  • User experience design

SharePoint Integration with Enterprise Search

Microsoft SharePoint is often used as team tool; and this creates particular challenges in meeting enterprise goals for sharing knowledge.  Many organizations also have commitments to high-power search engines that cut across multiple content repositories.  Many of these can be configured to access Microsoft SharePoint documents, with appropriate attention to taxonomy and document tagging. We can help you make all your distributed SharePoint documents accessible through a single enterprise search platform.

  • Solution design
  • Metadata and taxonomy
  • Governance
  • System integration

SharePoint Implementation

We understand that a tool is only as good as the implementation and that technology alone does not solve problems -- people, the right technology solution and solid business processes solve problems. We can provide the right information to your team, develop an initial implementation based on best practices and share good governance, process and management practices that your firm can immediately use to ensure success. We can provide developers, of all levels, who can help you build your custom or package-based application.

SharePoint Information Architecture Training

Many of the issues that we see with implementing Microsoft SharePoint effectively are fundamentally information architecture (IA) problems. For example, if:

  • your users complain that they can't find information
  • the search engine return irrelevant results
  • you are confused about how to juggle content types, managed metadata and navigational elements in a way that actually helps solve these findability issues

then you have IA issues.  The challenge for most organizations is that there are so few Information Architects. That means success depends on having everyone involved take on some of the IA role. 

Learn more about this idea in this blog post "Do You Need an Information Architecture Center of Excellence?"

Our SharePoint Information Architecture training is a 3 day hands on experience covering all aspects of taxonomy, metadata and search in SharePoint. This isn't a class just for SharePoint 'experts'. It is a class for anyone who has a stake in making their SharePoint sites a success.  Learn more about SharePoint Information Architecture training.

Seth Earley discusses the challenges of collaboration and information reuse with SharePoint:

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