SharePoint 2010 and Information Architecture

Information Architecture. It’s is lots of things to lots of people. In the web sense it is all about usability, navigation and search. To the more hard core EDRMS types it is all able the classification and metadata that drives the ability to store, link, retrieve and retire (destroy records).

Most ECM repositories have the capability to take an Information Architecture model and  make it part of the system.

SharePoint, MOSS, Office SharePoint Server. What ever you call it is now a ubiquitous platform that has really hit mainstream usage.

Having been around ECM for awhile I remember the AIIM Conference in Philadelphia in 2006. Wham; There was Microsoft right from out of the blue with a massive presence at the Conference. There was buzz, there was comment, there was concern from other vendors.

Finally in the domain of Information Architecture Microsoft is making a strong play. The public beta for SharePoint 2010 is a real step up in the tools that have been made available to deploy an enterprise Information Architecture framework.

Now there is the concept of Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM) and the creation and deployment of this metadata is above the web application layer which means that we can now build metadata model and taxonomy term sets  that can be consumed across farms and site collections from a central service, rather than having these locked into the site collection level.

Sounds liberating, it is. Now we have the ability to develop the Information Architecture as a service rather than having it baked into the site collection. To some this may not sound exciting but to an Information person this is really excellent news.

SharePoint 2010 Records Management

The records centre in SharePoint 2007 was always a bit of a first step in records management for SharePoint as far as I was concerned.

The limitations still outweighed the benefits and we were constantly looking to other products to supplement the features of SharePoint as a product set.

Now with SharePoint 2010 there is a whole new set of features that makes the management of records in SharePoint exciting and easy to deploy.

Administrators can now put in place the “in place” records practice so that content is still kept in context of the collaboration space. Or if required the document can be shipped to an other repository and a stub left in place in the collaboration location to still allow users to access the document as required.

Just these features are a significant improvement from the 2007 way of how things worked.

The big lever to assist in the records management area is the use of an Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM) service. This service allows administrators to define enterprise content types and enterprise metadata and through the sue of these and content organisers and content rules define the necessary record keeping tools to make the creation and disposition of records in SharePoint easy and painless to the end user.

Go Microsoft is what i can say from the look that I have been able to glean from the SPC sessions that I have been to.

Every Cloud has an IT lining

So I have had a quick look at the cloud and checked out a cloud provider that once was an ASP provider. In looking into this and other providers I got to thinking that every cloud has an IT lining.

Well there is going to be hardcore IT in that Cloud somewhere. That means tin, string, people and process to manage it all.

However, the great thing with the cloud is that you can be in your living room with a Pentium 4 under the living room table and an “Awesome” online brochure-ware for cloud services.

How do I differentiate between the “cloud clowns” and the real cloud providers.

Cloud will be dominated by big brand names, because the level of trust needs to be there to drive the security and comfort that people need to make the plunge will be available through high grade shark type telco and infrastructure or software providers.

Both Microsoft and Google are making a big play into the Cloud space. At the current Microsoft SharePoint conference the “on premise” or “in the cloud” mantra is very evident and SharePoint 2010 has significant multi-tenant features that will allow customers to choose as they se fit as to location and deployment of application. But as we said every cloud has an IT lining, just make sure that your is secure.

SPC303 – SharePoint 2010 IT Pro Overview

The IT Pro has many new features that are Cool in SP2010. Scalability, ease of management and support have been baked into the product.

Powershell is definitely a “must use” tool for SP2010. It seems to feature all over the place and that is not a bad thing.

The biggest change from a software infrastructure is the Services Architecture that now provides for solid and extensible Metadata Management model outside of the Web Application and Farm level; about time I say.

So you can create and manage metadata asset items outside of the Site Collection / Web App / Farm and have them published and consumed across multiple farms, now we are starting to talk about a scalable architecture for information management.

As well as a new and cool services architecture the way that you administer this architecture and other system features has also had a massive revamp and the SharePoint admin now has a good UI to manage all the necessary parts of the software and content infrastructure.

SharePoint 2010 is coming of age and the release is a significant shift in the services and capabilities that are provided. For the other vendors out there it is time to start watching you back.

SharePoint 2009 Conference - Keynoting

Well it is day one of the SharePoint 2009 Conference, with a theme of Connect, Collaborate, SharePoint.

We have had the keynote and the take away from this session is how much SharePoint is a key part of Microsoft’s strategy going forward.

Steve Ballmer was loud but quite reserved I thought. He was definitely looking to position SharePoint as the platform of the future.

Some of the key advancements in the platform, such as:

SharePoint On Premise or in the Cloud – You choose and deploy. You can have it here or there or in both places at once, connected together.

Metadata management that finally makes sense -Create and manage metadata that can be then used across farms, web apps and down into the site collections.

Business Connectivity Services – This replaces or extends on the Business Data Catalogue and is now two way updating

SharePoint Workspaces – This allows you to take SharePoint and connected business data offline. A very cool feature and one that will allow you to create some powerful composite applications.

Overall a good start to the Conference and there is over 7,400 people attending. Even just being 1/3rd back from the front the people on stage were very small. It was good to have the big, big screens. More later it is now session time ….