Monday, November 16, 2009

How to do a SharePoint project

Refn: http://sharepoint.mindsharpblogs.com/Bill/archive/2009/10/08/What-Does-It-Take-to-Implement-a-Company[dash]Wide-Taxonomy[ques].aspx
Following article is by Bill English.
In my(Bill's) mind, the first place to start is strong set of business requirements that outlines what you want the taxonomy effort to achieve. In every company I've worked with, this has been lacking. With the lacking of a clear outline of the problems that need to be resolved, it's tough to know what success looks like and even more difficult to gain champion and grassroots support. So, the place to start is to ensure you have clearly defined business requirements that management has approved and can (and will) support.
What else needs to happen?
At a minimum, you'll need to work towards these goals:
Need to get a single-version of the truth by eliminating outdated or redundant data
Need to tag information with meaningful data that is highly discriminative
Need to train users to use the input and findability tools plus their metadata
Need to change the culture to get everyone on the same page because this represents serious culture, business process and information management changes
Need to develop document-type lifecycles that specifies the following:
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Document Type Content Owner Security Level Repository Recoverability Tool(s) Education Policies Metadata(Descriptors) Workflow ConsumingAudience ContentType
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Envision
Creation
Consumption
Retention
Archival
Disposition
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Every company addresses these elements in a different way and in a different order, but essentially, you're connecting the following:
How information goes into the system (Putability)
How information comes out of the system (Findability)
What tools are needed for both
Taxonomies
Document Life Cycles

Let me emphasize that organizing information in SharePoint is directly connected to organizing information in your organization. This is *always* a business process, information management question before it is a technology question.

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