Joe Shepley News & Articles

In the last post, I called it like I seen it: SharePoint out of the box can’t do records management. 2007, 2010, 2013 -- none of ‘em left to their own devices are worth much when it comes to automating the retention and (more importantly) disposition of your records according to the retention schedule.

Let’s start this admittedly provocative post with a question: Anybody out there actually doing records management in SharePoint?

Let’s face it, no matter how you slice it, SharePoint has been a big success: for Microsoft (78 percent of enterprises currently running SharePoint according to AIIM), for end users (finally some technology they could relate to), and for the enterprise content management (ECM) community (at last, people were somewhat excited about what we do for a living). 

I’m at the end of a series on how to build and deploy successful SharePoint document management applications, with the goal of migrating end-users off of the most prevalent legacy document management system out there: that unholy trinity of shared drives, hard drives and email.

I’m in the middle of a series on how to build and deploy successful SharePoint document management applications, with the goal of migrating end-users off of the most prevalent legacy document management system out there: that unholy trinity of shared drives, hard drives, and email.

In this post, we’ll dive deeper into migration planning, one of the most challenging parts of the process.

I’m in the middle of a series on how to build and deploy successful SharePoint document management applications, with the goal of migrating end-users off of the most prevalent legacy document management system out there: that unholy trinity of shared drives, hard drives and email.

In this post, we’ll dive deeper into system design and testing, one of the most exciting parts of the process.

For those of you keeping score at home, I’m in the middle of a series on how to build and deploy successful SharePoint document management applications, with the goal of migrating end-users off of the most prevalent legacy document management system out there: that unholy trinity of shared drives, hard drives and email.

In my last post, I sketched out at a high level what I see working at organizations trying to move off of older repositories onto SharePoint. 

What I want to do in the next few posts is walk through a process that, while by no means a silver bullet, gives you a better chance of success than the typical approach.

In my last post, I outlined the decision point that the SharePoint user community faces right now. I caught some flak after the post that I want to address here head-on: some folks pointed out that whatever SharePoint can or can’t do in theory, in practice SharePoint implementations frequently fail to provide improved document management…and organizations find themselves with as big (or bigger) of a mess as they had with shared drives, Lotus Notes or whatever else was in place before SharePoint came along.

As you would expect, Microsoft is being predictably tight-lipped about the next release of SharePoint, but that doesn’t mean we’re not all anxiously awaiting SharePoint 2013/14. In January 2012, two years after the release of 2010 and five years after the release of MOSS, dynamic document management is at an interesting crossroads.

Last post, I began looking at my picks for noteworthy enterprise CMS 2012 trends:

1. The rise of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
2. The evolving relationship between compliance and social media
3. ECM goes viral
4. Realistic retention
5. Mainstream Enterprise 2.0
6. Mid-tier ECM steps up to the plate
7. SharePoint decision time

I’ve covered #1 - #3 already (so start there if you missed it). Let’s turn now to the rest of them…

Here in Chicago, our Lite Rock radio station has completed its annual transformation into The Holiday Lite, playing Christmas music round the clock, so it’s definitely not too soon to begin the annual litany of analyst prediction posts…

In my last post, I walked through some of the reasons why compliant social business is so challenging. In this post, I want to take a look at the four steps organizations need to take in order to give themselves the best chance of solving the compliance challenges of going social.

I recently attended JiveWorld11, where a key theme in many of the presentations, as well as most of my conversations, was compliant communities. I’ll admit to being a little bit surprised, because to date, Enterprise 2.0 and social media practitioners seem to be, if not completely unconcerned with compliance, at least less concerned than they should be.

In my last post (Making Money Off Social Media: Nothing Else Matters), I used Olivier Blanchard’s Social Media ROI as a jumping off point to argue that the only reason a business should get involved in social media is to generate more revenue, increase margins, or save money (or some combination of the three). And actually, there’s nothing peculiar to social media in all this: In general, businesses do stuff in order to influence (directly or indirectly) one of these three things.