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SharePoint: the backbone of your information architecture
By Rob Koplowitz and Leslie Owens - Posted in KMWorld Jun 1, 2009
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SharePoint buyers expect intuitive navigation, contextual search and easy administration out of the box-but such benefits depend on how content is structured, labeled and categorized, and they require a nuanced understanding of how different audiences will navigate and search for information.
The information architecture (IA) behind a SharePoint deployment has lasting consequences for the user experience and for Web site management. Information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals should use their SharePoint implementations as an opportunity to set solid information architecture in place that turns today's information overload into tomorrow's valuable information assets.
The upshot?
Information workers will finally be able to find the critical information they need to do their jobs.
For the past 10 years, information architects have worked through how to organize and present information on corporate intranets. Common best practices and design guidelines have emerged, which include prioritizing directory lookups, news, and financial and human resource (HR) information on the home page, as well as offering task-driven or process-oriented navigation-such as how to orient a new employee or how to move offices-in addition to functional navigation. Organizing and controlling the information on an intranet has historically fallen to a small team of stakeholders who update the site map, scope the search engine and design the navigation. That manual approach does not scale well to large enterprises with diverse needs.
Many enterprises unveil SharePoint to facilitate developing their intranets-better employee communication and shared access to team information. But unlike a simple intranet or collaboration solution, SharePoint also includes portal, Web content management and business intelligence capabilities. A project plan focusing on quick deployment of SharePoint workspaces may overlook critical information classification tasks necessary to make SharePoint effective as an enterprise intranet and knowledge management vehicle.
In particular, SharePoint has some distinctive elements that affect an enterprise's information architecture. For one, SharePoint content is stored in a SQL Server database, not in a hierarchical file server. SharePoint sites are managed in one or more "site collections." By default, the content in each Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web application lives in a single site collection and is stored together in the same database. Enterprises typically divide their content into multiple site collections due to performance, storage and management concerns. A single site collection cannot be stored in multiple databases. Thus, the absence of a treelike site structure defies traditional navigation of content from root to leaf.
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