The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

I had this post in my queue for the longest time and never got around to publishing it. It’s a great article about Intranet Managers by Paul Chin – http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200703/ij_03_12_07a.html.

A lightbulb above my head went ding! after I read that article and I thought a more fitting title for the role of Intranet Managers would be Information Managers. This, I believe, is due to the fact that as more companies evolve and migrate their paper content to digital media, Intranet Managers will eventually evolve themselves to have a larger footprint. Not only providing the bridge between business, tech and other information silos, Information Managers will ultimately be responsible for providing the governance to all of this content and information. 

With my own experiences, implementing SharePoint as a hybrid intranet/collaboration environment, I’ve often times had to decipher the content and organizational structures of digital content myself. That’s where the beauty of metadata and Content Types within SharePoint comes in. I can create mandatory metadata fields and Information Policies to help manage all of this information better. For example, I have a Document Library that project managers can use to store all their documents. With mandatory metadata fields that need to be filled out upon uploading a document, we will be able to more easily search/filter/create special views for the most relevant information.

I previously wrote about using Content Types and Document Templates here: https://blog.henryong.com/2007/02/12/how-to-create-document-templates-for-document-libraries/