How do you get your users to buy into the importance of tagging documents to create a good ECM strategy? This is a battle that is not won overnite and it a war best not waged alone. In a presentation, ECM for the masses, Ryan Duguid talks about 3 principles for participation using SharePoint 2010 tools. I did not attend this session at the conference, but really wanted to come back and view it. I did so this morning and was really impressed with SharePoint 2010’s robust ECM tools. So, here is my recap and my thoughts on the tools in SharePoint 2010.
Although you cannot rely on technology tools to create good collaboration in your community, Microsoft has done a phenomenal job of building enterprise ready tools to allow the technology to be seamless in SharePoint 2010. Duguid states that the 3 principles of participation in enterprise content management (ECM) are:
Payback
In order for users to see the value of entering in metadata for a document they must see the payback. They must know why their filling in all of those fields. The question or misunderstanding I generally see is that users want to create a folder hierarchy in a document library. I then ask them what value that provides as opposed to their file share. They tell me that it’s online and that provides value. I then tell them that email can do that. They rebut with the fact that there is only one copy. I then tell them that that’s what their file share provided. At this point, they’re usually stumped and I’ve talked them into using the file share. I then ask them how many documents they’re going to expect to publish. If they say that it’s dozens or hundreds or even thousands I can usually start showing them the metadata that I would apply to a document and then show them how keeping them in a single document library can offer the consumers of the information to filter and sort quickly based on the metadata they append to the list item. SharePoint 2010 cuts down on many of the views you used to create for every way you wanted to slice the information because it provides these views based on the metadata. Using the new metadata sevice store (MSS) you can create, site wide, site collection wide, farm wide or even cross farm meta data. I’m not going to bother with the different terms that were tossed around at the conference as I do not know that Microsoft has agreed on all of the terms such as Term Sets, content types, metadata store, metadata service store, etc.. I heard them used interchangeably throughout the conference last week and I don’t believe everyone has the same usage of these terms. I’ll simply refer to them as metadata and the metadata store which is where they are housed. By the way, there is a separate database for the metadata store which allows for it to be shared as a Service Application (replaced Shared Service Providers) across farms.
Because of the new Service Application model and the ability for this metadata to be stored across farms it is very easy to show how their data will be searched for, rated and findable across the farm. No longer does a person have to know what site collection and site to go to find the information.
Transparent Process
The second complaint I hear from my users is that they think it takes way too long to enter in the metadata for a single document and it’s intrusive to their workflow. In SharePoint 2010 many of the uses of the metadata are visible and you end up wondering how it manifested itself without any intervention from the user or IT. You will find Office 2010 to be even more aware of SharePoint than Office 2007. A new feature that I am looking forward to digging into is Office Backstage, which shows all of the properties and metadata on a document. Your Office 2010 documents will now be aware of the SharePoint document libraries that you interact with and appear in the Backstage. One of my favorite new features in document libraries is the use of unique identifiers for every document. This ID is one of the columns on the list so there’s no CAML you need to know in order to find a document id. It’s very legible makes SharePoint 2010 a great option for document imaging solutions.
Simple and Intuitive
It doesn’t seem like the meta data process is less intrusive to a user’s workflow as much as it invades all of the other areas where users work. Instead of a user taking time to go to SharePoint to make changes they can do it from their Office application, from SharePoint Workspace (Groove’s replacement) or from SharePoint. I wonder if this is Microsoft’s plan. That is, to consume the majority of the information worker’s time within their product lines. Once they do that, then they can bring it all back into one application (SharePoint) where information workers will live. I have heard time and time again that SharePoint will be Microsoft’s operating system….eventually.
Metadata comes in many forms and it doesn’t have to be an either/or scenario anymore. It can be a both/and scenario where a user is required to fill in some of the metadata from the MSS, but they can also classify it with their own tags. So, you can use the corporate taxonomy while still allowing a folksonomy to take place. As you see commonalities in the folksonomy, SharePoint 2010 allows you to take those keywords and work them into the corporate taxonomy. Because taxonomy has to be flexible, SharePoint 2010 allows you to create new terms, deprecate old terms, copy terms, reuse terms, move terms, merge terms, and delete terms.
Filed under: Enterprise Content Management, SharePoint | Tagged: ECM, Enterprise Content Management, metadata service store, MSS, SharePoint, sharepoint conference, term store
