CM004 | Content Management - Content In The Cloud

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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 – and this is my JOB. I’m not exactly surprised that folks with actual day jobs get confused, so let’s take a quick look at O365’s 3 most commonly used content storage options:


OneDrive for Business

We all know what our My Documents folder is for, right? That’s where we save all the stuff we consider OURS – the raw data we depend on to do our jobs but no-one else cares about, rough work product not yet ready for public consumption, etc. But the My Documents folder is on my machine’s hard drive – what if, horror of horrors, my machine dies – or is stolen??

That’s where OneDrive comes in: Think of it as a cloud-synced replacement for your My Documents folder. OneDrive syncs all your documents to the cloud in the background while you work, so if the unthinkable happens, you simply kill the connection to the old machine and re-sync all your files to a new one. You lose, like, maybe the last 20 minutes of work. Big whoop. Worried about the confidential files on your stolen machine? OneDrive encryption means your laptop thief can’t get into them without your credentials. OneDrive will save your life. Okay maybe not literally, but it will save your sanity.

Microsoft Teams

Teams really came into its own during COVID lockdown, so most of us are already familiar with it as a remote chat and meeting app. But Teams is far cooler than that. 

Think of Teams as a high-velocity communications platform for real-time interaction. A place where users can meet, chat, plan, share, and collaborate with ease. Teams allows you to plug directly into a whole toy box of apps for knowledge management, task planning & tracking, news feeds, process automation, time management, analytics, and many more – and that’s just the stuff on Microsoft’s app list. Teams also allows 3rd party providers to create plug-ins ranging from your company’s CRM / financial / sales / customer service systems to data visualisation, training – heck, there are even mapping tools. The list is almost endless.

Of course, everything has a price, and while Teams’ immense collaborative muscle is the perfect space for fast-and-loose, in-time communication and collaboration, the very same lack of rigour that makes it convenient in the now makes it unsuited to long-term content management and governance. So instead, we allow Teams to be spun up when needed and collapsed when their purpose is spent, leaving the governance heavy lifting to the kids who actually find that kind of thing interesting.

SharePoint

If enterprise-wide content management is your thing, SharePoint is where you need to be. There’s a reason why so many Enterprise Document Management Systems (EDMS) are built on a SharePoint platform – SharePoint does most of the hard stuff for them. SharePoint’s built-in functionality natively supports good content and records management, providing exactly the kind of foundational stability and rigidity you need to ensure flexibility on an operational / user level.

But that doesn’t make sense, I hear you say. How can something be flexible and rigid at the same time?

I think I have just the story for that. In our next instalment, we'll take a look at real-world example of rigidity and flexibility working hand in hand. Until then, take care and keep both feet firmly planted on the ground.

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