SharePoint Sprawl
Talking with a Government prospect the other day we discussed the proliferation of SharePoint 2010 collaboration sites that are great during the creative stage, but how do you repurpose the content once a project is completed? According to Microsoft, in 2009 there were 100K SharePoint users; every day for the past five years 5K new users are added to SharePoint; and one in five users have access to SharePoint.
SharePoint one of the most pervasive technologies in recent years. Microsoft and its ecosystem have done a tremendous job in selling the value of the platform to the enterprise. The ease of deployment, maintenance and perceived low price tag has made SharePoint the choice for many departmental collaboration and simple content management solutions.
These solutions tend to be loosely-organized, relying on users to classify and manage the lifecycle of their content. The issue is that in many large scale enterprises the adoption of SharePoint has become viral with some enterprises (for example the US Air Force having to put a moratorium on the deployment of SharePoint 2010 until they get policy, governance and structure around its use and effective deployment to the enterprise).
Given the current economic climate we are seeing organizations looking to do more with what they already own and many own SharePoint as a part of their enterprise agreements. Think about your own enterprise and how you manage content. It’s not just one file system, or one SharePoint instance. These repositories, silos, they’re everywhere. There could be hundreds of SharePoint repositories.
From an information governance perspective, you need to develop an enterprise metadata repository, normalize the terminology, secure the sensitive content, ensure records are declared, as well as deliver better search results. My client and I agreed our Smart Content Framework™ provides the building blocks and the technology which includes a taxonomy builder, classification, and workflow engine that allows you to define the business rules, identify how to tag each document and then route it if required. It’s a sensible approach and encompasses and reigns in the SharePoint sprawl found in many organizations.
In our discussion we also talked about the importance of building an enterprise metadata repository that enables the proactive management of content. This is what we consider the first building block in the framework. This is an enterprise infrastructure component tightly integrated with information governance and the management of the lifecycle of content. From this, enterprise search, compliance, records management, and data privacy issues can be addressed and managed.
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