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SharePoint: the backbone of your information architecture

SharePoint: the backbone of your information architecture
By Rob Koplowitz and Leslie Owens - Posted in KMWorld Jun 1, 2009

Add time for information architecture tasks to your project plan
It's common to organize the sites by department structure and then department function (e.g., Purchasing > Contract negotiation) because existing security groups are often modeled with that hierarchy and it's familiar to users. But information architects should make the most of their intuition about human behavior and skills in interface design, content analysis and technical know-how to challenge that status quo as needed. Some companies create site collections based on product names, client names or project names to offset the tradeoffs of hosting each department's content in a separate site collection.

Site collections are just one piece of SharePoint information architecture. After determining how to structure SharePoint, I&KM pros must decide how to distribute universal information to multiple roles and groups, how to harmonize local and global metadata properties, and how to implement search.

There are two ways to get started on that. The first is to ask your users. Determine the boundaries of your user base: Does it include clients, partners, vendors, the whole enterprise or a limited subset of knowledge workers? Do geographic or functional boundaries matter? Interview a sample of users to understand what content they need and how they access it today.

The other is to analyze your content. Audit existing content stores to understand where high-value content lies and how it is organized. What content will be migrated to SharePoint, and how will you integrate what is not? How much content is duplicated? Is it templated and carefully managed throughout its life cycle? The answers to these questions will inform your decisions around content types, information management policy and metadata fields.

A rigorous approach to information architecture in the design phase is critical to facilitating flexible information delivery and access. SharePoint administrators translate the output of the design stage (e.g., paper prototypes and wireframes) into URL namespaces via "managed paths." Depending on circumstances, they might allow a single site collection under a specific path or allow users to create multiple top-level sites under a specific path.

Other mechanisms for contextual information access and delivery include audience targeting and search configuration. Audience targeting enables I&KM pros to define a subset of users by certain common criteria, such as a shared project or interest in a topic. Administrators can hide or show Web parts or target any item in a SharePoint list-like a news item-to defined audiences. As for search configuration, MOSS 2007 search can look across site collections, crawl shared drives and Web sites outside of SharePoint, map co-workers by "social distance" and retrieve data in line-of-business applications.

Further, search administrators can pick "authoritative pages" and assign best bets to popular search terms to optimize relevance. And, remember audience targeting and advanced search need clean, coherent metadata to run properly. Without significant commitment to taxonomy oversight, those capabilities will not work.

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