In a video tutorial, approximately six minutes in length, Chris McNulty of Dell, actually provides an overview of SharePoint architecture, and, further, SharePoint Information Architecture suitable for non technical users. The title of this video tutorial is Understanding Metadata.
So this short video tutorial is suitable for presentation to SharePoint stakeholders, who may not want to get bogged down in technical details, but, nevertheless, need to understand why SharePoint is capable of providing a very useful foundation for business intelligence gathering activities like enterprise content management (ECM) systems.
Of course, at the same time Chris does provide a short definition of the concept of “metadata.” But the bulk of the content of this video is more about SharePoint architecture and the architecture it provides for “information” (meaning data), than anything else.
Chris defines “metadata” as “after” “data”. He bases his definition on a literal translation of the Greek word “meta” as “after”. In a couple of sentences he presents the common application of “metadata” in SharePoint: “It’s either used to describe information in lists, or, most frequently . . . data that’s used to classify documents as they are stored in libraries.” This latter option, of course, will be of interest to those SharePoint users responsible for compliance reporting, or for any method of managing the task of recording the types of content produced by an organization.
Approximately 1.5 minutes into the presentation, Chris provides his audience with a succinct description of SharePoint information architecture. This architecture consists, at the top level, of the SharePoint Farm (a collection of servers), a web application (which he presents as any SharePoint “top level” URL), and, finally, a Site Collection which serves as the “Home” SharePoint location on an intranet (or, for that matter on a public internet site, but this option is NOT discussed in the video).
He then presents the common practice of building department sites (with a corresponding library for each site), within the “Home” site collection. He also introduces the notion of “content types” in a manner suitable, as already mentioned, for a non technical audience.
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