There’s so many things wrong about this blog post title it’s tough to know where to start… Let me preface my comments with the revelation that I love SharePoint and what it does for content of all types within enterprises large and small. So I bristle when I hear the notion that SharePoint is simply a glorified shared drive. But I must admit that for some SharePoint environments the sad reality is that it’s true. What’s even more frustrating, is that there is often nothing even glorified about the way that documents are being managed in SharePoint.
Let’s start with the words “Shared Drive”. The concept of sharing implies far more than a single place to go to navigate up and down file folders in search of a particular document based merely on the file name… To effectively share information there needs to be some sense of order. What shared drives can’t tell you is:
- Is this the latest version of the document ?
- Who last updated it ?
- What kind of information is in the document ?
- Should this document even be here?
- Are you allowed to edit this document?
- Where should you save it ?
- …
These fundamental enterprise content issues can hardly be addressed by the name of a file. No doubt you’ve seen the veritable customerproposal9final-final-final3.docx parked in one of your fileshares. Beside consuming expensive storage, the real cost to the enterprise is the friction that occurs from the lack of confidence that users experience when evaluating if the information is the best source of the truth.
Drive: Let’s face it, the amount of old content that is loitering on shared drives is staggering. My back of the envelope calculation and 15 years in the trenches leads me to believe that at least 80% of content in shared drives shouldn’t be there.
SharePoint. For some organizations, a primary motivation to integrate SharePoint into the enterprise is to better manage documents. This is a terrific motivation and I fully support this but what often happens is that some shared drive content is “migrated” into SharePoint and users are told that this new way of accessing information is somehow better – even glorified. What many organizations fail to comprehend is that users have been traversing file structures for 30+ years and pointing them at a SharePoint document library is a good start but it’s only a start. The good news is that this glory state may seem like a distant vision but it’s actually just below the surface.
It’s no accident why Microsoft’s content management platform has the word “Share” in it. SharePoint 2010 throws some potent tools at the management of files and lots of other content types as well. Getting your collective arms around the management of enterprise content happens when IT and the business sit down at the table and open their respective kimonos. A productive meeting between these two forces might include:
- Content experts admit they have a hoarding issue
- IT catalogs the type and amount of content being stored. Including when the files were last accessed. Brace yourself.
- A steering body including representatives from legal, HR and Finance establish realistic governance for permissions, retention, disposition and compliance policies.
- The team has the collective will to actually clean up outdated content.
- The team begins the process of categorizing the remaining content and defining an enterprise taxonomy.
- IT works with domain experts to develop an Information Architecture to provide a means of storing and cataloging content with meaningful terms to enable useful search results.
- Users are brought into the discussion to understand how to store, update, version, tag, etc. new content so they aren’t tempted to revert to the dark ages when they hit a roadblock. This process is crucial for success. There are very elegant ways of using SharePoint in this way that remove much of the burden for publishers
The end result of this effort will be a demo where the CEO is asked to find some important content on the Intranet. First they are pointed at a legacy shared drive and asked to find the latest xyz document that HR is using for subject abc. Go. The stop watch begins.
Next they are asked to locate the content via SharePoint. The CEO is presented with a tablet, a smartphone and a laptop. They pick up their favorite device and hit the corporate homepage. They enter xyz into the search box and filter by HR. Done. The time on the stop watch will be irrelevant for you’ve just enabled the Enterprise to travel at warp speed.