Your SharePoint Investment
Seven Ways to Get Payback
SharePoint administrators in large enterprises face major challenges these days.
For starters, employees are busier than ever. In some large enterprises, there are thousands of users with publishing rights. Many of these individuals have little time and even less interest in manually meta-tagging documents. Meta-tagging is recommended for achieving a better SharePoint experience, be it search; document and records management; process automation or simply to take advantage of the people and social networks in an enterprise.
But with information doubling every 15 months, SharePoint administrators are getting an earful about the lack of metadata governance. “Better information access is critical,” employees say. Business leaders are more direct: “Just get it fixed!”
What’s an IT Department to Do?
Smart businesses turn to technology that leverages the value of their SharePoint investment. IT decision-makers must consider the following dos and don’ts when looking to optimize their SharePoint solution:
1. DON’T rely on manual tagging. SharePoint relies on manual tagging, which is inconsistent, labor-intensive and prone to errors. Businesses want software that tags content automatically, according to the business’ preferred terms. In addition, the software must give employees the option to confirm or adjust the tags applied by the automated classification process. Automated classification is the only realistic way to efficiently tag SharePoint content. It will ensure accurate, consistent and granular metadata to drive a good search experience, records management policy, SharePoint workflow process, or SEO tagging process for public information. This saves organizations’ time and increases quality.
2. DO build and manage taxonomies with consistency. It’s important the information in an enterprise is classified consistently. This requires tools capable of building taxonomy models that encapsulate the classification standards already in an organization. In addition, look for tools that can import, combine, organize and harmonize lists and taxonomies in order to leverage existing corporate and third-party taxonomy assets.
3. DON’T lower your expectations when taxonomies change. It’s a bit much to expect busy employees to manually tag content even once, never mind every time the taxonomy changes in your organization. Businesses need software that reclassifies content automatically when a taxonomy changes. Specifically, you need a taxonomy model management system that is integrated with SharePoint so that it can power the native term-management facilities provided by SharePoint. A master taxonomy-model management system can be used to develop, manage and control all the enterprise taxonomies and ontologies that are then pushed out to all systems, including SharePoint. This also means the enterprise semantic platform has open access so that all other information management systems can connect to it.
4. DO offer semantic search and navigation. Look for semantic search and navigation capabilities that rely on subject ontologies to power the SharePoint search experience. Findability increases, information is discovered and the user experience becomes contextual. This leads to satisfied users and better decision making.
5. DON’T neglect external content and systems. Demand an enterprise system that connects to external content and systems. While SharePoint is undoubtedly a key part of your organization’s information management infrastructure, there are likely other critical systems in your enterprise. All of these systems benefit from automatic metadata classification and contextual navigation. Insist on an enterprise platform rather than a SharePoint-only solution to maximize your investment in taxonomies and ontologies.
6. DO tap into your legacy content. Legacy information stored in SharePoint 2003, 2007, file shares or content or document management systems is unlikely to be tagged with the correct metadata for the taxonomies being deployed in SharePoint 2010. This means organizations will have to manually tag all content being migrated into 2010. Look for software that can automatically apply the correct metadata to all migrated content according to existing taxonomies. This accelerates SharePoint commissioning and ensures the migrated content is a higher quality than it was in the legacy system.
7. DON’T forget the ontologies. Ontologies are a useful tool to help employees to better understand the information at their fingertips. Upgrading taxonomies to ontologies enables employees to navigate a knowledge map of the organization, exploring the links between topics and the content and resources related to these topics. The ontology is a powerful tool that communicates concepts, information and ideas to colleagues, partners and clients. This is most relevant in employee or customer self-service where users sometimes have only a vague idea of what they need or want. SharePoint does not support ontologies.
Innovation Isn’t Hard to Find
The Ford Foundation, one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations, heeded many of these dos and don’ts. The Foundation deploys Smartlogic Semaphore, an enterprise semantic search platform, that integrates with SharePoint.
The Ford Foundation now has improved its metadata quality by developing subject, location, document type and other taxonomies, with associated classification sets. Semaphore classified several large libraries—some with more than 490,000 items—and populated several indexed and searchable metadata fields.
The Foundation has enhanced enterprise search and facilitates more frequent and efficient sharing of information across departments and field offices. Employees have been able to more effectively locate the information they need to do their jobs and continue the Foundation’s fight for justice and an end to poverty.
Smartlogic’s Semaphore is an enterprise semantic platform that augments traditional information management systems such as search, content management and business workflow engines by adding advanced content classification, metadata and navigation capabilities to deliver a more complete enterprise information management experience. More than 200 companies, including NASA, Bank of America, AutoDesk, Occidental Petroleum, Ford Foundation, Pitney Bowes, The National Health Service, ABN AMRO, The Office of Public Sector Information and Yell.com use Smartlogic.