Some thoughts on SharePoint
So, being part of a small development team... who am I kidding, I am the Development team, I have to wear several hats. One of those hats is as our SharePoint developer. As such I've been trying to work out what makes a good SharePoint site arrangement?
Having had to work with a messy site, for a few years, I've been trying to work out what I'd do differently, here are my thoughts.
Just under your Landing Site, I'd stick a Record Centre with full versioning turned on. I would also add Content Management on that Record Centre removing the base Document Content Type and replacing it with an Organisation specific extension of the base Document Content Type. This would have whatever fields your Organisation requires but most crucially a people picker Contact field. The idea behind this field would be, if you want to know what this document is for and who to contact for updating, that's where that information would go.
Once you've fielded one too many equiries for you to update a document (not my job), and been told when you couldn't locate the document to update, 'just do a search for it' You'll understand why.
I would require all publish ready documents to go in the Record Centre and nowhere else. Again, I've been bitten too often by Documents being spread all over the place.
As for Department sites, this I'm wondering about at the moment. Having had to deal with a few departments merging and splitting recently, I'm not sure if I agree with creating Department sites. I like the idea of Functionality/Project sites and what with all of the goodies coming out of Office 365 lately, Outlook Groups, Microsoft Teams etc that seems a bit more sensible.
It does seem that practically everything that's coming out of Microsoft at the moment appears to be a flavour of what we used to think of as SharePoint site templates. Planner, Outlook Groups and Microsoft Teams. and it can be a bit confusing as to what to use when.
As such, I think how I'd manage it, would be. Create a Team site for a team that works regularly together. You can hook up whatever services you want to this and create whatever documents you want. Once those documents were ready, they could then be moved into the Record centre. If you needed a business facing platform/site, you could then create a site to announce what's been happening, but pretty much just keep it at that.
Office 365 and the SharePoint world are getting very interesting these days.
Business Change Manager - MoD
8 年Good stuff Paul, my only addition to this and advice from experience of putting in SharePoint sites before is one of the main 'enablers' is to make 'group' sites as open as possible so that other people in the business can find, benefit from and collaborate on content/documents. You should adopt an open to all policy unless you can prove that there is a benefit to locking it away (HR and Finance docs being the obvious ones). The clue is in the name of the product 'Share'Point :-). For me as a Knowledge Management advocate 'sharing' is the most important aspect of any system and will break down the current silo mentality if implemented correctly.