At a basic level, intranets based on SharePoint are just like every other intranet. The same questions of design, structure, management and governance arise, regardless of the technology used to publish the site.

As discussed in the earlier article Promoting the intranet as a service, the intranet should be considered a service, underpinned by a technology product.

SharePoint does, however, introduce some new questions into the intranet planning process. The greatest strength of SharePoint is its breadth of functionality, from content publishing and collaboration, to CRM and application development.

It is this wide range of capabilities that can be so daunting for many teams. Without a clear plan, the results can become a little bit of everything, but no one clear and compelling success.

This article outlines a best-practice methodology for planning SharePoint-based intranet projects. Drawing on the Intranet Roadmap™, it provides a step-by-step approach that every team can take.

The result is confidence from the outset that the project will deliver clear benefits, and an approach that brings together business needs and technology considerations.

Intranet projects on SharePoint need a clear direction

Challenges and opportunities

Intranet projects are not easy at the best of times. Often replacing sprawling legacy sites, they have to meet the needs of a diverse audience with a limited budget and constrained resources.

SharePoint intranets are just like any other technology platform in this respect. Independent of the underlying product, the new intranet needs to be usable for staff, valuable for the business, and easy for the intranet team to maintain.

SharePoint does introduce, however, some particular issues of its own, both positive and negative.

[April article, read the full article]

CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Specification) has been ratified as a standard by OASIS. What is it and what does it mean to buyers and users of ECM and Document Management technology? Well put simply, CMIS is the most important new standard in the ECM world in decades; it is critical for any enterprise scale RFP.

ECM is an aspirational term for many, one that suggests a single layer/platform/system/methodology that will address your enterprise content needs no matter how complex, diverse, or voluminous. Some major vendors promote this approach, and buyers for such systems also exist, but they make up only a small minority in this market. So, though it may seem a little dull by comparison, from now on we will use the terms Document Management and Records Management where they apply, and will reserve the exotic ECM moniker for that rare breed of big, complex, and typically very expensive platforms that actually merit such a grandiose term.

It struck me again how big a challenge recordkeepers have within organisations. To be successful and useful, staff must save all the relevant documents into the system.

If only 20% of documents are archived, the system is a failure. If 50% are saved, the system is a failure. (Who would look in an “authoritative archive” when 1 in 2 documents are likely to be missing?) If 80% are saved, the system gets a bare pass (that’s still 1 in 5 documents missing from the collection.)

This makes adoption imperative, and highlights how hard it is to demonstrate success in the early (and later!) stages of rolling out the recordkeeping system.

For me, this means I’d prefer to have 100% of just five types of documents, rather than 20% of everything. At least then I could say to staff “For these five things, look in the recordkeeping system because they’re all there. For everything else, we’re getting to that.” This is a very different approach to training every staff member, hoping for the best, and only getting 20% of what’s needed.

What do you think? Worth trying?

Like many organisations, the Council had a flood of snail mail letters coming in and going out, all of which needed to be scanned and saved into the records management system (EDRMS). The goal: eliminate 90% of the physical letters going out, replacing them with emails, also saved into the EDRMS.

Now, as he put it, recordkeepers can tend to be a bit, well, shy. Not normally best suited for going out and talking with people.

So he sent the entire recordkeeping team on an eight week Toastmasters course. With their new found confidence, he sent them out into the organisation to talk to people one-on-one. They visited everyone who routinely sent out printed mail, explained to them the benefits of replacing this with email, and showed them how to use the systems.

The result: mission accomplished. A huge drop in snail mail, and big increases in productivity for all involved.

I love this for many reasons. It’s simple, achieving a corporate objective without fanfare, one person at a time. It recognises the human side, both for the recordkeeping team and general staff. It’s thinking out of the box, not afraid to stray outside of traditional technology, training or policy approaches. It also gives the recordkeeping team skills for life, and shows them respect.

Have you seen something similar?

So you’ve chosen the right records management (RM) package, got the smartest developers in your firm to design and develop the solution, and today you successfully went into production with the application. Lo and behold, it works! High five’s all around! You start procuring copious amounts of champagne for the celebratory party.

Problem is, you’ll wake up tomorrow with a headache that’s not just from the bubbly. Some users will chafe at having to change cherished ways of working. You’ll have to deal with an inevitable surge of support and enhancement requests. Your IT department may begin a series of risky configuration changes. And then you’ll discover rafts of new and different content types to deal with.

Question: How do you decide what content goes on intranet and what content goes on a Document Management System. Is it an issue in your organization?

In order to use Web 2.0 technologies externally it may be necessary to affect culture change internally. It is not uncommon for people who have spent much of their professional careers using traditional methods of taxonomy, records keeping and information management, to be cautious of, or resistant to approaches which are inherently messier and less ordered.

If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry it’s the word compliance.

To me it’s like fingernails down a blackboard, and frankly if I never hear it used again then I would be a happy man. Of course I have to endure the word in virtually every article and vendor press release I read. I don’t like the word because it is a blanket term that used without context is totally meaningless, yet it’s a word (much like governance) that sounds impressive and few people in the room will admit that they don’t really understand it. Well let me be among the first to point out the the Compliance Emperor often has no clothes.

In my previous post, I brought up a topic on the implementation challenges of taxonomy and suggested a few points on overcoming pitfalls for multi-faceted taxonomy implementation. This time round, my reflection is based on ground 0, where there is no corporate taxonomy design to start with.

This idea requires incremental and continuous investment and its not a short project period affair. Like the Chinese saying goes, “Cast a long line to catch a bigger fish”.

The number one issue now is to avoid complex metadata profiling. It is a nightmare for staff to browse the tree of each taxonomy facet to profile a document uploaded. Profile it once, twice and if he is patient enough, he will stop at the third time. And thereafter, you will expect the remainder of the documents to be in his local drive, circulated through emails. How do we avoid this pitfall?

Sarah Heal presented today for NZKM in Christchurch on Records Management as a part of KM Strategy. Over the last year she has detected some unexpected and at times inconvenient signals, a growing body of anecdotal evidence that something is not quite right in information management. There have been lots of failed IM/KM initiatives, and EDRMS is the “Emperor with no clothes”. There just aren’t any really good exemplars in NZ of very successful deployments. With project budgets often ranging from $0.5 million to $1 million, this is an expensive problem.

Much is made of the need for all staff to understand their recordkeeping responsibilities. To this end, many training and communication programs are conducted within government agencies (and elsewhere).

To a large extent, this training has failed. While staff gain a general awareness of recordkeeping, they are not provided with sufficiently concrete and detailed guidance to make their recordkeeping successful and consistent.

This article explores ways to help staff meet their recordkeeping obligations by creating a single sheet of paper for each staff member with everything that they need to know.

Traditional recordkeeping training

Most organisations have fairly well-established staff training programs on recordkeeping, covering topics such as:

• what is a record
• why records need to be kept
• recordkeeping obligations of all staff
• how to file records in corporate record keeping systems
• when and how to dispose of records

Crucially, this training only talks of records in general terms, outlining statements such as ‘records are any documents that provide evidence of a decision or activity’. In practice, not every document or email should be kept, and these general statements do little to help staff make judgements about what to file.

The training also fails to tell staff where to file individual records, other than generally pointing to the corporate records systems.

[CM Briefing 2007-08, read the full article]

• Three goals of a taxonomy
• Records management case study
• Information architecture
• Card-based classification evaluation

Understanding and evaluating your taxonomy (PDF, 477kb)

The open source community has produced a number of useful, high quality content management systems which presents an opportunity to deliver tailored content management solutions without the high licensing or management fees associated with commercially-licensed or hosted software. However, the sheer number of open source CMS projects and the ineffectualness of traditional commercial software selection techniques can make the task of finding the right open source software an intimidating challenge. The strategy of using feature matrices is particularly ill-suited to open source software selection. A more practical approach is to match your needs to a common business problem that others have solved using open source software and engage with the community to learn about their experiences in implementing the solution. Doing so will take advantage of the unique aspects of open source software: the openness of the user community and the transparency of the development process.