Companies are slowly moving to the cloud, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint continues to soar as a preferred collaboration system in the cloud for many medium to large organizations. One of the common challenges faced by companies once they’ve migrated over to the cloud is educating their workforce on the best practices within Sharepoint when it comes to managing the documents and all types of content they store in this team platform. As organizations grow larger, managing this training and knowledge dissemination internally become more challenging, and third-party providers such as an IT Solutions Company may be able to support this transition. This first article in a series talks about how an organization can create a solid roadmap in establishing a robust content management system that would be strongly accepted, used, and supported across the organization.
In this article, we’ll discuss the first two collaboration questions to consider when teams across the organization start planning and drafting their content structure for Sharepoint.
Question 1: What are the most common types of content and collaborative processes that are shared within your team?
To answer this question, each member of the team may write down the file name and type in a shared excel file. To easily identify these types, they can think about those documents which are frequently “attached and forwarded” via email or shared through hard drive / flash drive transfers. These documents usually are edited, updated, appended, and approved by at least one other person in the team aside from the original owner of the document.
Question 2: Who owns the document types and processes identified above?
While some may think that this is a question which may be answered by just common sense, it is important to officially identify the person or role in the organization who is primarily responsible for the document. This means this person or role will oversee all action taking place within the document, and make sure this document is “clean” once it reaches the final stage of approval and publishing. Whoever in the organization has a question on the any part of the document should go to the owner of the document for the latest status and/or next steps, if any.
In our next article, we’ll talk about the next questions to ask after identifying the type and owners of documents and processes within the team.
