Divine by Zero

“Folder is an F word and we don’t talk like that here” These timeless words spoken by one of my favourite SharePoint professionals of all time have travelled with me through every project I have tackled since. For some, this would be a controversial statement, but from where I sit it’s not only best practice, it’s good old fashioned common sense. Why do folders make my blood run cold, you ask? Good grief, child, where shall we start? One-Dimensional View Here’s a screen shot of a set of folders in a SharePoint library: We all know there are more folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders beneath this, but unless we actually go through the pain of clicking through who-knows-how-many levels of folders, we will never know what we have and what we don’t. Pretty much the polar opposite of user friendly. But if we drop the folders and take the metadata route instead, we can view the library content in any number of ways. For instance, I might choose to view my library contents...

In my last segment, I spoke briefly about the differences in M365’s content storage options and which option is best suited to which purpose. I then spent some time discussing the importance of a well thought-out content management foundation layer and how the rigidity and stability of that foundation supports flexibility on the user level. As promised, in this segment we will discuss the building blocks you’ll be using to build your foundation, or if we’re building it for you, your Mint Content Framework (trademark pending, I’m sure.) Metadata Simply put, metadata is data that tells us something important about other data. I know, that sounds really convoluted. Here, take a look at these screen shots: I went into my Windows Explorer, right-clicked on a file, and selected “Properties”. This little window popped up detailing information like my file’s size, name, path, age, last modified date, access permissions, word count, and more. This is the f...

Back in the day when I was young and stupid, I had a bunch of friends in the off-road racing community and let me tell you, watching Subaru and the legendary Colin McRae walk off with the 1997 WRC (World Rally Championship) title made me lose my ever-loving mind. In my then-20 years on this planet, I'd never enjoyed driving a car more than the first time I took an Impreza for a spin. More than anything in this world, I wanted a 555-blue WRX of my own. As it turns out, my budget – and my already-long list of fines – stopped that little dream in its tracks. It wasn’t that they took the title – it was the fact that they took it for the THIRD YEAR IN A ROW. No-one had ever pulled off a hat trick before and it was MAGICAL. [PRETTY SURE THIS WAS THE AUS RACE – 1997] So what – or who – or combination of the two – do we credit with this feat? The mad genius that is McRae was the perfect choice for this team at this time – no doubt about that. But a driver is nothing without a car th...

Ding ding ding ding! You made it! It’s been a long, hard slog, but here we are at the end of January 2023, suspiciously eyeing the horizon for the Next Big Thing to try and eat us. What can I say, hope springs eternal. In my last segment, I discussed the differences between document / content management and records management. I also spoke about content management as a discipline and as a strategy, highlighting the importance of executive support for content management strategy across the enterprise. The sad truth is, in all the years I have done this work, I have known two – yes, TWO – companies who approached content and records management with any real strategic focus. I know, I know. I whine a lot. I want to get us to the place where we can start talking about SharePoint as a content management platform, but before we do this, we need to have the “when to use what” discussion. When I first started working on O365 I was a little intimidated by how many options I was faced with ...

Hoo momma, did I make a huge ass-of-umption. There I was talking to probably my favourite content migration partner of all time and he was flinging the hallowed “CM” word all over the place, and none of what he was saying made any sense. Now I’ve made this toolset sit up and bark on more than one occasion, and I knew it did some pretty amazing things, but it was still essentially moving stuff from here to there. You couldn’t use it to monitor for naughty behaviour, you couldn’t use it to set up management rules, and you couldn’t use it to create or configure any of the building blocks I would typically expect to find in a content management toolset. So what on earth was he going on about? It took me a while to figure out – far longer than I’m comfortable admitting, actually – but I got it eventually. No, my favourite migration toolset hadn’t grown a new appendage. My colleague was talking about ETL – the 3-step process used in almost all forms of data migration (Extract > Transfor...

In the previous instalment, I spoke a little about issues companies face in their content management practice as related to information security and integrity. In part 2, I’m picking up where I left off, airing more dirty laundry – I mean content issues – we are all likely to run into at some point. The thing with content I ended part 1 with a discussion of information integrity: how it becomes so ridiculously easy in the typical traditional space to end up with duplicate files everywhere and no way to establish which one is the single version of the truth. Well, this next one leads to the same end result, albeit by a slightly different path: Version Control and Document Lifecycle Management Even if you’ve managed to side-step the Adventures of Spartacus, you’re not quite out of the woods yet. Even if you have the most disciplined users in the world and you can guarantee you have no duplicate folders / documents, you still have to deal with the barrel of laughs that is version ...

Content – information – is my life. I’ve never quite understood why organizations don’t do more to get the full value out of the content at their fingertips. I mean, yes, of course, there are the gods of Google and the Book of Faces who absolutely have found ways to capitalize on the data flowing through their fingertips, but I haven’t quite reached that point in my human evolution where “megalomaniacal villain” sounds like the kind of job I’d like to add to my CV. No, I’m talking about finding ways to manage the information we interact with every day in ways that enrich our clients’ interactions, protect our clients’ interests, simplify the task of remaining in compliance with whatever regulations our industry is required to follow, and allow our staff to get back to their day jobs instead of chasing their tails over floating sheets of paper. In this series, I’ll attempt to step through my own journey with content management, highlight the most common frustrations us real humans f...