Content Management Step By Step

The Content Managment articles on this page are intended to be read in order, which can be difficult to track in the typical blog site layout. To help with this, I've listed all Content Management articles in their correct order below:

  1. CM001 | Content Management - The Thing With Content (Part 1)
  2. CM002 | Content Management - The Thing with Content (Part 2)
  3. CM003 | Content Management - Is Content Management Even A Thing?
  4. CM004 | Content Management - Content In The Cloud
  5. CM005 | Content Management - Stability vs Flexibility: The Subaru Story
  6. CM006 | Content Management - SharePoint Lego
  7. CM007 | Content Management - BUT MUH FOLDIZZZ!!!
  8. CM008 | Content Management - Start At The Beginning
  9. CM009 | Content Management – Frame It! (Part 1)
  10. CM010 | Content Management – Frame It! (Part 2) - Content Types

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CM007 | Content Management - BUT MUH FOLDIZZZ!!!

“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
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CM008 | Content Management - Start At The Beginning

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I have a family of hamsters living in my brain and the hamster wheel is frequently out of service. I think of myself as barely house trained - I am naturally chaotic and housekeeping is SO not on the top of my list of fun things to do, but at the same time, visual clutter makes me ANXIOUS. ADHD is a barrel of laughs. In my personal life I try to organise the layout of my environment in such a way that the correct place for storing an item is also the place my hand naturally reaches for it: mugs directly above the coffee machine, sugar next to the mugs, pantry items stored and grouped based on what is most likely to be used together, and so on. That way, both packing items away and retrieving them can essentially be done on autopilot. It's not perfect, but it helps. As it turns out, good content management uses a lot of the same principles I use when organising my spice rack. And man, there is no better feeling than logging into my worksp
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CM001 | Content Management - The Thing With Content (Part 1)

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
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CM010 | Content Management – Frame It! (Part 2): Content Types

So back in the sixth instalment of this series ( CM006|Content Management - SharePoint Lego ) I touched briefly on the concept of Content Types in SharePoint, but I didn’t really go into the black magic that makes them go vroom on a tenant level. That’s what this instalment is about. (my apologies to the Paklid community) To summarize: in part 6, I said that Content Types help us “templatize” the way we work with documents that fit into the same category. I used the example of a company needing to standardize / systematize meeting documents to make them easier to store, secure, and track for contractual / compliance purposes. For this example, I said we would need to track metadata for: Department Meeting Type Meeting Date Document Type Internal / External attendees (maybe?) I said we’d need to create a “Meetings” content type to pull together all the document properties (taxonomy) we wanted to track into a single manageable entity. I believe I used this grap
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CM002 | Content Management - The Thing with Content (Part 2)

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
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