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What?
Why?
Who?
When?
How?
Tools
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Brings together content, objects, size,
scalability, taxonomy, metadata, navigation
High-level planning
◦ Don’t get too detailed
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Very often neglected
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It’s NEVER OVER
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Risks if you don’t
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Decreased usability/findability
Performance/reliability issues
Lack of user adoption
Future enhancements can be costly
Benefits if you do
◦ Consistency, usability,
reliability, security
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Good architecture = Good experience
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IA Design
Planning Management
Infrastructure/Storage
Metadata
Content Types
Social
Navigation & View
Security & Auditing
Taxonomies (Closed or Open)
Search (Managed Properties, Scopes, Search Centers)
Identify & Create Records (Legal Requirements)
Retention & Holds (Litigation)
Importing Information (Batch Loads)
Rich Media
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Up front: Create at least a basic plan as soon
as possible.
◦ Costs increase exponentially over time.
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As you progress, implement iteratively
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Treat it like governance
◦ Meet regularly
◦ What has changed?
◦ What works/doesn’t work anymore.
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Invite
◦ Stakeholders must be involved
◦ Not too many
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Listen
◦ Understand requirements (audience, legal, etc.)
◦ What do you mean by that?
◦ Keep an open ear for metadata
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Visualize
◦ Existing environment
◦ Card sorts/whiteboard
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Communicate
◦ Options
◦ Pros and cons (there is always a trade-off, no ‘cake
and eat it too’)
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Agree
◦ Build a consensus
◦ Get it in writing
◦ Stick to it
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Execute
•What needs to be
stored?
•Why does it need
to be stored?
•How does it need
to be secured?
•How is your site
organized now?
(like it or not, folks
are used to it)
Content
Business Need
Security
Topology
•Who will be
retrieving your
information?
•Who/how will
contribute?
•Who ‘owns’ this
information?
•Who will maintain
the information?
Customers
Authors
Owners
Administrators
•What is the
lifecycle?
Control
 What is the cost of not finding information?
 If it isn’t available, how important is it?
 Can the audience contribute to the
architecture? (Open vs. Closed)
Structure
 Cost of creating content vs. finding content
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Scalability
◦ Limits – Number of site collections, items in a list query
limits, total items, overall database performance.
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Usability/Findability
◦ Two ways to get to data:
 Search = Metadata
 Navigate = Visualization
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Manageability
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Authoring experience
Distribution
Centrality
Empower authors/content managers
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Security
◦ Granularity vs. Performance
 Permissions need to be checked for all objects being
rendered
 Granular permissions can be a nightmare
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Design Resiliency
◦ Under-plan: Won’t survive the current solution.
◦ Over-plan: Won’t survive the next solution (e.g. too many
content types)
◦ Balance of priorities, volatility, and what ‘can be known’
◦ Future flexibility vs. current needs – Focus on building a
solution for general flexibility, rather than trying to identify
every possibility.
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Realize it will be wrong
◦ It has to be, because you can’t possibly know
everything
◦ Communicate that expectation
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Get it as good as you can
for today, with flexibility
for tomorrow.
Plan to fix it over time
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Hierarchy
◦ formally ranked group: an organization or group
whose members are arranged in ranks, e.g. in ranks
of power and seniority
◦ Hierarchy Approches
 Business Unit – Easiest, but dangerous
 Functional – Domain (Role) e.g. HR - Employee forms
vs. Manager forms
 Hybrid – Business may be needed, but
structure the architecture so that it
can ‘flex’ to a different model.
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Taxonomy
◦ grouping of organisms: the science of classifying plants,
animals, and microorganisms into increasingly broader
categories based on shared features.
◦ Taxonomy Approaches
 Departmental = Easy to store (creators)
 Functional = Easy to retrieve (consumers)
 A natural, healthy, conflict between the two
◦ At what level is it useful?
 Think of our buddies up there: Do we need to classify them
as “Rabbit”?
 It depends! Hierarchy/content determines taxonomy…
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Taxonomy vs. “Folksonomy”
◦ Taxonomy = Scientist
◦ Folksonomy = Layman
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Benefits
◦ Improved usability
◦ Relevant searches
◦ Faster navigation
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Consistency, consistency, consistency
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Content Types
◦ Syndication – Create content type ‘hub’ that entire
organization can use.
 Publish/Subscription model.
◦ Document Sets – “Super-Folders” that behave like a
content type
 Groups documents as a single unit
 Versioning as a whole
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Property Promotion – Pulls properties from
documents and promotes them into
SharePoint for filtering, workflow actions, etc.
External Content Types - Multiple content
types that come from an external system (as
if it is inside SharePoint)
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Folders vs. Metadata
◦ You can set metadata based on folder structure
◦ You can use content organizer to create a folder
structure based on metadata
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Navigation
◦ Visualization of the IA, Taxonomy, Hierarchy
◦ Should be highly controlled at the top level, and
flexible/allowed to change at the ‘leaf level’
◦ Determines your initial design – OOB navigation is
site-collection specific
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Will it scale?
(Depth of navigation)
Need to monitor throughout
to adapt to changing
requirements. (Nav = Performance)
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Plan on improvements through end-user
feedback
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Intuitive = Success
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Folders are fine if you expect all users to
navigate in the same way
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File explorer
Other applications can interact.
If you use folders, keep it shallow (cognative memory)
Still have the 256 URL limit.
If you want to allow for multiple navigation
schemes, you need metadata
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Term Store
◦ Database that contains taxonomy information
◦ Each Includes:
 Groups – Containers for Term Sets (security controlled)
 Term Sets – Containers for terms (can determine whether
open/closed) – Pushed like content types
 Terms – Predefined values that contain taxonomy objects
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Structured
◦ Specific, managed data, but less flexible
◦ Ensures proper use/compliance, familiarity
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Unstructured (‘Folksonomy’)
◦ Allows users to participate (add, tag)
◦ Builds/exposes relationships that were not
previously envisioned
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Can be used for Metadata-based navigation
Metadata Validation (Based on your rules)
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Content Organizer
◦ Allows for automatic routing rules for submitted
documents
◦ Drop-Library: Customers
have a single ‘drop-location’
in which document is routed
to the correct location based
on metadata.
◦ Implemented as a feature,
must be activated
◦ Auto-enforces 5,000 items per folder rule
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Social Features
Stream of social networking activities
Community-driven
Follow what colleagues find useful/interesting
Comments – Improves content. Communicates to
the author about usefulness.
◦ Tags – Improves searchability
◦ Ratings – Assess value of content.
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Rich Media
◦ Automatic Image Upload (Automatically uploads
images referenced by a document during upload)
◦ EXIF Data Promotion – Data that accompanies
images can be promoted into SharePoint
◦ File Dialog – Open and close documents, insert into
SharePoint directly from the file dialog
◦ Previews (view/play in place
 Image Preview
 Thumbnail Previews
 Video Preview
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SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management
Implementers' Course
◦ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/sharepoint/hh126808
◦ Or Bing: “SharePoint 2010 ECM”