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the Free CMSWire NewsletterSharePoint best practices and advice are nothing new — consultants like me have been inundating SharePoint users out there with our tips, tricks, advice, admonishments and so on for years. You could make a whole career out of doing nothing more than telling people what to do and what not to do with SharePoint…and lots of people do.
But in my travels through the content management landscape of corporate America, I can count on one hand (with some fingers to spare) the number of organizations that have benefitted from this advice in a sustained way. Typically, SharePoint is a mess wherever I go — little better than the share drives (and often worse than the Notes databases) it’s meant to replace.
Part of the difficulty organizations face with SharePoint is both how big the problem is and how small the solution needs to be; that is, everyone, everywhere, across all organizations and across all SharePoint sites suffers the effects of a bad SharePoint environment, and the solution won’t come from sweeping organizational reforms, but from changes to how each person works with each document every single time they touch it.
Fix It
Enough preliminaries: let’s dive in to what I’ve found to be the most effective ways to improve a SharePoint environment through changing how end-users work with documents on a daily basis. These are not technically complex, but they pose some challenges because they require a commitment from end-users to spend an additional 15-30 seconds during the document creation, upload or check-in process.
And although we all know that users are notoriously reluctant to spend any extra time at all during these activities, if you frame these in terms of the time folks waste looking for documents they can’t find (which end-users almost universally acknowledge is a significant time waster), you stand half a chance of getting folks on board for at least one of these — and doing even just one of these consistently will have a huge impact on the overall quality of your SharePoint environment.
1. Begin Filenames with Document Type
Bad file names are probably the most significant problem for end-users in SharePoint today. They make it difficult to find information you’re looking for whether you’re using search, navigating through folders, or just hunting and pecking.
And while file naming is complex and requires a significant amount of effort to get 100% right at an organization, if you wanted to do one thing to improve your file naming, hands down it would be to begin all filenames with an indication of the document type, i.e., meeting minutes, project plan, purchase order, etc.
What each user puts into the file name after that is anyone’s guess. But imagine what it would be like if you could go into a document library and know, just by looking at the filename, what kind of document each document you saw was. And that’s precisely what you get if everyone takes the time to put the document type first in their file names:
Figure 1 – Standard File Naming Example
As you can see from this example, when you start file names with the document type, you increase findability by sorting — and avoid having users open each document to determine what it is. And it’s pretty tolerant of things like misspellings (as long as you get the name fairly close) and wide variations in the rest of the file name.
Of course, to be successful with this, you need to decide on some document type naming standards, but at least within work groups or departments, there tends to be general consensus on file naming — it’s just a matter of formalizing that consensus and encouraging folks to use it going forward when they work with documents in SharePoint.
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