Using SharePoint for Knowledge Management

Preservation
End-users must have the confidence that all content and data in their organizations' SharePoint environment is fully protected against accidental deletion or corruption. All content must be protected in a manner conserving storage resources while enabling fast, full-fidelity restoration. The SharePoint environment itself must also be fully protected—including system configurations, customizations and workflows—via customizable, synchronous system backups.

Furthermore, everything must be easily discoverable, depending upon business-specific needs, for regulatory compliance purposes. By taking care of the following points for their SharePoint deployment, organizations can move forward confidently in their pursuit of successful KM:

• Maintain digital assets in accordance with business needs and compliance requirements;
• Ensure swift restoration of content items following corruption or accidental deletion;
• Maintain all object metadata during and after recovery events;
• Ensure seamless transition to a warm, stand-by system should the main production system fail; and
• Maximize platform up-time and swift restoration of platform following a disaster event.

Again, it's vital to stress that if end users are not confident this new system will protect its content and be available regardless of any type of disaster, they will not adopt the platform and go back to old habits-essentially halting KM in its tracks.

Management
From an IT perspective, it is essential that the SharePoint environment is truly an enabler for KM by designing a topology that aligns with their organization's specific processes and unit structure. That means allowing for automated deployment management, unified users and settings management, real-time content replication, and system-wide reporting. Additional challenges include:

• Manage the organization of unstructured enterprise content via a KM system architecture that aligns with enterprise operations and business units;
• Administration of systematic metadata tagging to facilitate search and navigation of enterprise content;
• Efficient document versioning and check-in/check-out management for information consistency;
• Robust administration of end-users, to ensure each has access/modification rights for only those SharePoint elements for which they are authorized; and
• Management of collaboration and workflow tools, for controlled simultaneous information processing, including management of information from integrated business applications.

Essentially, don't let the technology be a roadblock to KM—address management needs in advance to allow for increased user adoption.

KM Utopia with SharePoint

So, let's go back to the story of our product marketing director working around the clock to finish that product brochure deemed the lynchpin to the business development pitch the next day. How can proper KM, utilizing SharePoint, make her life easier?

Instead of scanning through her own hard drive for product-specification documents, she could easily navigate to the product management site on her company's SharePoint environment—assuring her that she is creating content with the latest version of technically correct information by filtering for "last updated" and "last modified by."

She then opens her latest draft of the product brochure and inputs the proper information. Saving it to the product marketing library, she is able to email the product brochure—as a link, not an attachment—to her business development director and tell him where the document is accessible in SharePoint should he need to make any last-second changes. Better yet, any revisions made at the last second will automatically update to the one document—so everyone has the most up-to-date version. A single source of truth.

The only things cluttering her desk now are a candy bar wrapper and her keys. Opening the drawer in her file cabinet, she takes out her coat from where outdated documents used to be stored.

Confident that she has completed her task with the most up-to-date information, she shuts down her computer and leaves at 11:55 pm, knowing that she will not be the weak link. She had all the company's global information assets at her fingertips. This is the promise of KM with Microsoft SharePoint.

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To learn more about how AvePoint can help unleash SharePoint's full knowledge management potential, please visit www.avepoint.com.