Mike Doane has produced a video training course, Planning Taxonomy Implementation in SharePoint 2010. This video, one of eleven video courses on the topic of taxonomies for SharePoint 2010, is accessible to any and all subscribers to all of the site content on SharePoint-Videos dot com. As well, this course is included on one of our SharePoint Training DVD offers, SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Management. Finally, for organizations that require an in-context, task-specific method of delivering training content directly to users within SharePoint, this training course can be provisioned to users with our VisualSP™.
We highly recommend that anyone planning an implementation of SharePoint based around taxonomies review this video course. Our rationale for making this recommendation is that, from our perspective, truly useful taxonomies are built upon a very tight connection between business structure and objectives along with the technical procedures and tools that will be used to deliver, successfully on expectations.
Mike Doane presents the importance of including line of business (LOB) personnel within the teams responsible for producing taxonomies. Mike recommends that, at a minimum, efforts be made to at least lobby LOB executives on the question of how best to structure taxonomies. He goes on to note that any opportunity to enlist the participation of these users in the planning process should be seized. Therefore, as we see it, Mike shares our view of the imperative of the LOB & IT connection that we have just presented.
We also fully endorse his position that a substantial period of time be allocated to the process of planning taxonomies. We think it will take a period of study to determine whether, or not, taxonomies have been structured successfully to support an optimum use of SharePoint for business intelligence gathering purposes as well as for governance.
Finally, we think it makes sense to empower the teams working on these structural design objectives for SharePoint 2010 taxonomies to do as much of the ground work as possible from Excel spreadsheets, rather than directly with Term Store tools. After all, LOB personnel are generally very comfortable using Excel and, therefore, will likely play a more productive role within these teams than would be the case if they face a technical hurdle whenever they have to participate in this planning process. In the next post to this blog we will look further at how Mike recommends planning processes for taxonomies for SharePoint 2010 be structured and implemented.
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