SharePoint Governance

Corporate intranets are changing fast! No longer are intranets created and controlled by a few select authors and webmasters. New social networking features are being adopted across all industries in an attempt to increase user collaboration and provide a support framework through a modern, feature rich intranet site.

Fears of users running wild and spending their working day tweeting or poking have proved unfounded. In fact, providing social networking features within the organization actually reduces the time users spend on external sites. Evidence also suggests that because users are in a working environment, they retain a professional attitude and don’t abuse the system. Companies are learning that there is a huge wealth of information held within their user base. Blogs, wikis, support forums etc. can all be used to leverage that knowledge and benefit the wider user community. Commonwealth Bank recently introduced a new SharePoint based intranet with social networking functionality and - among other benefits - have had helpdesk calls reduce by 50-60%, massively reducing support costs.

So, all good news then? Well, yes and no. The benefits are obvious: more collaboration from motivated staff interested in contributing to the site, the ability to tap into the knowledge of all users and possibly even a reduction in external browsing leading to increased productivity. It’s also safe to say that a failure to embrace social networking will lead to an exodus from the intranet to the intranet for the most innovative and forward thinking users, who use these tools daily in their private lives and expect to do the same in the workplace.

The drawbacks? It may be new and cool social media, but it’s all still content and as such requires a governance strategy to ensure that user-authored content is relevant, accurate, standards-compliant and appropriate for internal publication. The Intranet 2.0 Global Survey reveals that only 57% of all organizations have published user content policies and standards. This means that almost half don’t have any user content governance. Especially worrying when the same survey indicates that 87% of organizations have at least one social networking tool on their intranet. That’s a lot of ungoverned user content!

As described by Elizabeth Marsh of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, social media governance is all about mitigating the risks and fostering user trust. You don’t need a separate social media policy. A well designed Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) model will cover all aspects of content, including social networking. The risk of not having a solid governance model is that your organization’s content, including that stored in blogs, wikis, podcasts, status updates, comments and instant messages, will expand in an uncontrolled way, increasing risk and liability.

So, to enjoy the benefits of a popular and productive intranet you should fully embrace collaboration and social networking. Just be sure that you have appropriate safeguards in place. Take expert advice and ensure that you have a content governance model in place that will allow you to reap the rewards in a controlled and risk-free way.

Organizations use SharePoint for a variety of things, from Intranets to Extranets, from Customer Portals to document management and for team collaboration.

Recently there has been a significant amount of discussion around exactly what SharePoint is and what it offers. For example, a recent AIIM article highlights 8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system. A blog by the Microsoft Team describes SharePoint 2010 in 1 sentence, 8 categories and 40 features. The Rez's SharePoint blog provides a comprehensive comparison of features between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

One element thats there has been great excitement around, is the SharePoint 2010 taxonomy implementation and management across sites and site collections. Organizations must spend time and effort building the appropriate foundation for utilizing the content taxonomy. That is all well and good when a green field project is started, but considerations must be given to data that is already stored in previous versions of SharePoint; how can that information be classified correctly when undertaking a SharePoint Migration? Microsoft does not provide a tool or utility which can be used to apply a new taxonomy and as a result many organizations may become stuck during a MOSS migration.

Vamosa recently announced a partnership with MetaVis to help both existing and new customers get a better ROI and increased value when moving into SharePoint 2010 from SharePoint 2003 or SharePoint 2007 environments, by ensuring the new taxonomy values can be applied to documents.

The MetaVis Suite does not simply help organizations migrate their existing content into the SharePoint 2010 platform; it also provides features such as  a graphical top down view of the web estate and it highlights dependencies between objects. This provides the administrator with a complete view of how their sites are structured. The 'Live Compare' feature of MetaVis provides useful functionality as it allows comparisons of two sites to be undertaken in real-time, listing the differences between sites at the granular level of identifying column differences between content types.

Synchronizing two SharePoint environments at the click of a button is only one of many features offered by Metavis that will help SharePoint Administrators perform their day to day tasks more effectively and efficiently, while ensuring their organization has an effective SharePoint Governance strategy.

In his AIIM 2010 Keynote presentation, John Mancini talks about a variety of "disruptive forces" that will transform the CM industry. Among many other factors, he cites the following:

•    A demographic-driven shift in expectations of information management
•    Volumes of data rising faster than available storage
•     A "transfer of experiences... with consumer technologies into expectations for enterprise IT"
•    A pervasive feeling among enterprise users that information is easier to find on the web than in their internal systems

What this effectively means is that the realities of enterprise content management are continually diverging from the idealistic "everything you'll ever need" contention of traditional ECM suites. In chasing the carrot of single-point accountability, organizations have perpetuated an over-reliance on their content management systems, spurring vendors into building generic functionality - which may only crudely represent a customer's specific needs - or super-customized modules which can not adapt to changing business needs. In order for a CM implementation - like any system - to be effective in the modern enterprise, it must recognize two things:

1. It must address the specific needs of its users.
2. Those needs are going to change over time.

Organizations that have historically stemmed the rising tide of user requirements by tacking changes on to their  'all-in-one' systems will find this method inadequate to shore up the coming "data deluge". Mancini believes businesses will then stop investing in legacy systems that do not support the future and will look to the kinds of solutions which comply with the two tenets above: namely, solutions which are cheap, standards-based, and open.

Mancini contrasts applications with platforms, and specifically calls out SharePoint 2010 as a technology which, perhaps non-intuitively, falls into the latter category. Unlike traditional applications, these platforms will not ship with everything you'll ever need, and Mancini predicts a renaissance of process-specific solutions to fill this gap. This largely resonates with the practices of social and new media companies like Twitter and The Onion, who have created utterly unique experiences by bending open-source web frameworks to their will. In a similar vein, Vamosa's Expert Services organization has rolled out innovative solutions in the past two months by combining open-source frameworks like Sinatra and Django with SaaS offerings from Zoho and Heroku.

Taking this a bit further, I would propose that the concept of the platform is one piece of a larger framework (which Vamosa calls Enterprise Content Governance - ECoG) needed to effectively manage enterprise content. Successful CM architectures will incorporate a constellation of loosely coupled technologies, services, and processes. The businesses that succeed in this environment will be the ones who abandon the pursuit of the CMS holy grail and find a way to command a hybrid of proprietary and open-source platforms, point solutions, and services to achieve their precise objectives.

When creating or authoring content one important factor that is often overlooked by authors is correctly tagging the content. Perhaps this is a result of authors misunderstanding what is meant by tagging content properly.

There are two main approaches to tagging content; top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach has been with us for a long time, even before the invention of the Web and is still used extensively today with Web content. The top down approach tends to be more hierarchical and involves the use of a taxonomy. The bottom-up approach is however much less structured and allows for the tagging of content by the author without limiting them to a specific set of terms to describe the content. This form of tagging content has proven to be very popular in the Social Media sites such as Twitter, Flickr and delicious.

The hierarchical top-down tagging approach tends to be used for enterprise content, where audit requirements for regulatory compliance are more onerous. Corporate, Industry and Government taxonomies are increasingly being used within implementations of Content and Information Management Systems. Taxonomies are used to classify and help in the retrieval of unstructured data within the organization. The taxonomy, if designed correctly, should help to create a map of the content. The main benefit of this, over the bottom-up approach, is  it allows users to find the relevant information quickly. Taxonomies achieve this by supporting the broadening and narrowing of topics, which allows users who are not sure what information they require to zero in on the information relevant to them.

We can see, therefore, that it is important to tag content correctly as this allows for effective and efficient retrieval of information. The problem that exists within many organizations is that there is a slew of digital content published across hard drives, intranets and CMSs that is not tagged correctly and this volume of content is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Often, organizations  have a well designed taxonomy but authors are either not using it at all or are not using it correctly, leading to content being hard to find, content being created multiple times resulting in unreliable information being found.

In order to combat this all too frequent enterprise failing, it is essential that content is not only tagged but that it is tagged correctly to ensure that when content is found it is relevant and of use to the person requesting the information. To ensure that content is not only tagged correctly at source but that it also conforms to all of the other corporate standards, an Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) strategy should be implemented. Many organizations are currently considering a move to SharePoint 2010, which has limited support for enterprise-level taxonomies and organizations may want to consider solutions to control; tagging standards at the desktop as part of their project implementation.

Through truly effective Enterprise Content Governance – businesses can optimize their existing investment in enterprise content management systems through proper control of content, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency.