by jregist
19. April 2008 07:52
We have been doing quite a bit of thinking about our SharePoint 2007-based Intranet. Although we did a good job of customizing SharePoint to make it match our company branding, we have begun to think that we were a bit too conservative in how we implemented SharePoint. Specifically, it's clear to me that we created too many silos in our Intranet -- each department, office, and corporate initiative has control over its own site and how it organizes content. Less than a year after our Intranet was released, we're finding that this approach has created some information architecture and support challenges. We are now looking closely at making some changes to try to consolidate content into fewer collection points to address the issue of where our employees should go to add content and use a more tag-based approach to filter and display content in different ways.
There are plenty of issues for us to consider now, from technical approaches like my previous post about tag-based SharePoint implementations to publishing sites to custom content types tied to page and document templates. But one thing this is also important is some consideration of the role of IT in 'owning' the Intranet. In our case, we have been surprised at how forcefully some of our employees have taken ownership of their own sites and are able to speak clearly and passionately about the architectural and information management issues that they recognize in our Intranet deployment. This to me is quite exciting.
This post by Arpan Shaw makes some interesting points related to the role of IT and the emplowerment of people using SharePoint. Very interesting ideas that speak at a high level about how SharePoint affects the enterprise. I'd like to see much more discussion about these kinds of issues that relate SharePoint implementation to the social and organizational contexts of companies and organizations.
http://blogs.msdn.com/arpans/archive/2008/04/18/sharepoint-platform-and-application.aspx