Fixing the Mess under the Bed!

Remember when you were little and your idea of cleaning your room meant shoving everything under the bed? Thinking that you have solved all of your information management issues just by implementing SharePoint has a similar result: same mess, just better hidden. Without question, SharePoint is an essential component of your business productivity infrastructure. However, frustration in finding what you need quickly is still a common theme among users, and only grows as more content is added and more instances of the platform are developed.

Since the first release of SharePoint in 2001, the platform has grown in both features and adopters. Most recently, with SharePoint 2013 and its cloud version, SharePoint Online, Microsoft introduced an updated array of features geared toward keeping organizational users up to date. These newest features represent a nice step forward in enterprise product evolution and include items such as simplified document management, which streamlines navigation by introducing the similar document suggestions feature, and a more robust search solution with document preview thanks to the FAST search integration.

From the operational point of view, enterprises are adopting SharePoint to support groups and teams to work together in a more efficient and collaborative way. This means easy implementation of SharePoint websites that provide better access to content, advanced security features that limit access only to designated users, and a centralized system for maintaining and storing content, all with an easy-to-use Office-like interface. In turn, businesses gain value from a more simplified process to create, find and share information in an effort to positively impact the decision-making.

However, when it comes to being able to fully exploit the value of enterprise information—now recognized as one of the organization’s most important assets—some challenges still remain. The good news is that a healthy set of easy-to-integrate products and tools have made SharePoint an even more valuable solution for the enterprise. The introduction of these new tools cansignificantly increase the ROI of your SharePoint investment, and help you get rid of that mess under the bed.

Main SharePoint Challenges

The primary SharePoint challenges that organizations face can be summarized in three areas. Address these challenges, and you’ll be able to achieve the business value you hoped for with your original SharePoint implementation:

• Content findability
• Metadata strategy
• Consistency of human-based processes

Maximize findabilty.
The immediate post-implementation benefits of SharePoint (all of the content in one place, organized, visually appealing, etc.) are often followed by a sharp decline in usefulness as large volumes of unstructured data are added to the platform. As a result, users engage less, and SharePoint quickly goes from the solution to just another tool.

We’ve seen it time and again: Despite the platform’s potential and functionality, content findability actually decreases as content repositories grow in volume and number. Frustration, and distrust in the platform naturally follow.

Unfortunately, this does not match with the expectations and demands that have been put on our content management systems by the enterprise, and rightly so. In addition, improved contextualization on handheld devices and other platforms used at home have increased users’ expectations for employers to deliver similar levels of effectiveness with the available workplace tools. And those expectations only increase as one moves up the corporate org chart. As time has passed, a common theme has emerged: Valuable information that cannot be found, provides little value to the enterprise.

Limited findability is a strategic liability. And the exponential growth in an organization’s unstructured information only increases this lack of findability risk. If strategically important information cannot be located, the organizational decisions at all levels are not the best they can be. Whether it is a research report, an e-mail thread or supporting documentation, a missing piece of information weakens competitive power and weakens decision making effectiveness. Decisions based on incomplete details are often not the best decisions.

A solution must be holistic, one that combines taxonomies and search to ensure that content is available from its most granular level.

Implement an effective metadata strategy.
From helping maximize business opportunities to discovering threats intentionally hidden, a content repository’s metadata is an extremely valuable asset.

This is true for structured data and even truer for unstructured data. Because documents without contextually correct metadata describing their content are not only difficult to find, but extremely complex to decipher. Document metadata is best leveraged when it accurately describes the content clearly, with as much detail as the enterprise requires.

In a typical SharePoint implementation, the majority of documents stored are Microsoft Office documents. These files have a native capability to store metadata. However, in a typical workflow, only the most basic metadata are added. These so called “flag” metadata (including author [document publisher], submission date, document type and file name) are only partially helpful in refining a search when users need to access specific information.

Instead, the most important metadata for search and findability are “descriptive metadata” that actually describe what the document is about (title, subject, tags and categories). Because descriptive metadata must be added manually by the document’s creator, this most important metadata is often missing from a document, is not consistent from one user to the next or does not adhere to the corporate metadata model. In any of these instances, the native metadata capabilities in SharePoint are ineffective and not being used in the best way possible.

When descriptive metadata are added to documents stored in SharePoint, search immediately becomes much more effective. SharePoint’s native faceted search functionality that enables using a document’s metadata is now able to refine search results based on the content itself, not on generic attributes. Users benefit by being able to search based on what is relevant for them, without having to know who published a specific document or its file name, for example.