Enterprise Content Management (ECM) depends upon taxonomic structures, meaning a set of categories of information, which must be capable of defining the range of significant information (data) produced by an organization. Of course, this structure will vary, perhaps substantially, from organization to organization. As well, the term “significant” will have to be clearly and specifically defined on a case by case basis. SharePoint Server 2013 incorporates an impressive set of ECM features, so the same set of rules apply.
Chris McNulty is a widely acknowledged subject matter expert on Enterprise Content Management systems, including SharePoint. On December 4, 2013, Chris McNulty will lead an online course for SharePoint-Videos.com, titled “Managed Metadata and Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint 2013”.
Chris’ course is likely to be of strong interest not only to SharePoint administrators, developers and architects, but also stakeholders in any plan to implement the platform promising any chance of success. These stakeholders should include not only representatives from an organization’s IT group, but also representatives from important Line of Business (LoB) groups. After all, designing the right taxonomic structure to reflect an organization’s purpose, from the data it produces, is critically important to the success of the plan, and clearly requires an active participation from the important LoBs who can best contribute to building the right classifiers for content.
Metadata tagging is an important component of implementing the ECM features of SharePoint. Regrettably, most organizations skip over the work required to put together the tagging system. More often than not a SharePoint 2013 implementation either omits the tagging component, or proposes to implement it after the platform has been implemented. But planning the tagging process should be an essential preliminary activity, or else the whole SharePoint 2013 “edifice” might end up built on loose ground, without a foundation. Of course, building put up, in this manner, don’t off pass the test of time. So it’s best to include the tagging plan before starting the implementation process.
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