The Art of SharePoint Success: Strategic Lenses - Enterprise CMS & Collaboration

By Symon Garfield (@symon_garfield) Jan 12, 2012

Happy New Year and welcome back.

In our last article we began to explore a series of "strategic lenses" which I use to help clients understand and articulate their SharePoint related goals. We discussed value, knowledge management and intranets. In this article we’re going to wrap up on strategic lenses with Enterprise Content Management and the "C" word — Collaboration!

This is article number nine in the intellectual odyssey which is the Art of SharePoint Success, a four point framework for ensuring organizations generate long term, measurable returns on SharePoint investments. There are four elements to the framework:

Governance
Strategy
Architecture
Transition

Let's begin with Enterprise Content Management.

Enterprise Content Management

Many organizations approach SharePoint from an Enterprise Content Management (Enterprise CMS) perspective. A key element of enterprise content management is understanding the content lifecycle. Figure 1 illustrates the key stages in the lifecycle of unstructured content.

Figure 1: The Content Lifecycle

The Create stage of the lifecycle is very dynamic. Multiple people might be updating and editing a document, new versions might be created several times a day, there may be numerous cycles of approval and updates. Imagine a project in full flight with a team working to create the project deliverables.

Once the content or document is complete, the final versions need to be stored securely but still be easily found and available, and there may still be a requirement to make amendments or updates periodically. This is a stable and well organized environment.

Many organizations, particularly those in regulated industries such as legal and finance, may need to keep secure archive copies of documents for compliance reasons. Finally, content should be disposed of in a controlled and considered way.

SharePoint provides the platform to manage content throughout the complete lifecycle. Document libraries, search, workflows, information management policies, meta-data, content types are just some of the tools in the kit bag. But putting a document into SharePoint is not content management. It’s content storage, and if that’s all you’re doing then you may as well stick to file shares — they are cheaper. To "do" content management you need to support the full content lifecycle and to make it effective you should plan to support the lifecycle of content within the context of specific business processes. If your content management solution is a big bucket structured around business functions or departments then miss a turn and go down the snake!

Potentially each stage of the lifecycle could be supported by a different SharePoint based solution. A Collaboration solution could provide an environment for people to create sites for live projects or group working. A set of departmental or process based portals could provide long term storage for the completed or published content. A records center could provide archiving with and information management policies and workflows to manage the disposal. Alternatively, you could create business process-specific portals with distinct areas, sites or libraries to manage content at each stage of the lifecycle within that process. Finally, of course, there is Search to glue it all together. To the user these could all be presented as different tools for different jobs but under the bonnet they are all built on SharePoint.