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Last week I was fortunate enough to speak at the monthly meeting of the “Office of the CIO”( http://www.oocio.com/) – a Northern California CIO group that really has their act together.

We had about 18 people in the room who were interested in diving deep into a SharePoint conversation. I came to the meeting with about 25 slides with the intent of not getting through all of them but using them as a launching point into discussion topics that would speak to their individual SharePoint “pain points”.

They came to the meeting with 18 unique questions that were typed out into their collaboration app which took up the remaining 1 ½ hours. It was a great conversation and we didn’t get through all of the questions.

What I’d like to do in this and upcoming posts is to present some of their questions and my responses. I hope you find these helpful.

Question: Suggestions for defining the document management structure.

An effective document management structure can be built considering the following:

1. Keep the data close to the users. This means that the site structure needs to be such that end users are never too far from their data – for the 80% of the documents that they frequently access. Enterprise search can be used to find the rest.
2. Identify some common “meta data” fields and terms that can be uses as “Content Types” (A sharepoint term). This will help with enterprise search and finding the documents that you need.
3. Any documents that are legal in nature or under any government regulation (financial doc) should be kept in site collections that are under special control of “who can do what”, auditing controls, and retention schedules.

Question: I want to get rid of SP in 3 years. Is it possible to rip it out?

The short answer is “Yes” – SharePoint has a rich API that you could use to programmatically remove your raw data out. The problem is knowing where you would move that data. SharePoint is the 117 tool Swiss Army knife and chances are your employees have added a few over the years. So yes, you can get out of SharePoint but I have yet to find another single tool that offers so much functionality in one program. I would recommend that you attack that goal “use case by use case” and move the data to single apps that solve that use case for you.

I would also recommend that you not move to SharePoint 2010 as the feature set is so much richer that you may have a user community mutiny should you take that away from them.

Question: Guidance for effective administration and control to end user community.

SharePoint provides some very broad-brush tools and capabilities for this in SharePoint 2007 as well as the coming SharePoint 2010. For a better understand of what your users are doing and controlling their behavior in SharePoint you really have to go to third party tools. I recommend tools from either AvePoint (www.avepoint.com) or Quest Software (www.quest.com). Both of those companies have excellent tools to help with this.

Question: How will business usage patterns change with 2010 as new features become available?

I think that business usage will increase not driven as much by the general features available in 2010 but driven by the fact that SharePoint 2010 makes it so much easier to integrate your business data from other systems inside of SharePoint. I believe that SharePoint 2010 is going to become the “interface of the enterprise” for business data – regardless of where it’s stored. This transition will take some time as it isn’t the 1^st thing that enterprises will implement. But as your power users figure out how to do this – you’ll find rich composite applications create that use data from both SharePoint as well as your other business systems. Keep in mind that Microsoft as implemented this feature in such a way as to leave the date in your other system but surface it in SharePoint. This is a less “arrogant” position for Microsoft – which is refreshing.

Part 2
Part 3