Stephen Cummins, MVP

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Information Architecture Best Practices for
SharePoint
Stephen Cummins, MVP http//www.spsfaq.com

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What is Taxonomy?
A system of classification
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What is Taxonomy?
1. Those that belong to the Emperor. 2. Embalmed
ones. 3. Those that are trained. 4. Suckling
pigs. 5. Mermaids. 6. Fabulous ones. 7. Stray
dogs. 8. Those included in the present
classification. 9. Those that tremble as if they
were mad. 10. Innumerable ones. 11. Those drawn
with a very fine camelhair brush. 12. Others.
13. Those that have just broken a flower vase.
14. Those that from a long way off look like
flies.
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What is Taxonomy?
Then Darwin came along with the concept of
Evolution...
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What is Taxonomy?
It is an evolving structure.
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DNA of SharePoint

• Farms
• Roles
• Shared Service Providers
• Web Applications
• Site Collections
• Sites
• Pages
• Lists Libraries
• Views
• Columns

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The Goals of your Taxonomy

• Scalable
• Easy To Manage
• Findability

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The User is King

• Users will define content and structure.

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Start with Sites
Who Are The Audience Who Will Run It What Content
Will Be Put Into It
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Who Are The Audience?

• Intranet, Extranet, Internet
• Security
• Authentication
• Licensing

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Who Will Run It

• Network Administrators
• Site Content Mangers
• Site Administrators
• Users
• Training Plan

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Most Common Mistakes

• Structure like org chart.
• Too many properties
• Everything in one Library.
• Treat it like a Website.

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Best Practices (AKA, Rules.)

• Let anyone create a site based on a Project,
  team, department so long as they are responsible
  for managing adding content and granting access
• No deep hierarchies of sites, all top level
• Let users define properties, lists, libraries
  views and Web Part Pages
• SharePoint Designer training.

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More Best Practices

• Development only if necessary, if someone
  develops something, they have to manage it.
• Delegate everything.
• When there are about 120 sites or so, create a
  Site Directory.

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Even More Best Practices

• Use Site Quotas, and limit number of versions
• Use Policies to delete sites on access in a
  finite time frame, for example 3 months
• Train everybody, a lot

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Simple and Flexible

• A Taxonomy, like in Nature is Constantly Evolving
  and Cannot Be Predetermined
• Group Content by Similarity of Use and User
• Use the Simplest Unit of Structure That Fits
• Delegate to those who know the content best
• Train well

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Lots of Site Collections!

• Migrating to next version
• Moving site collections to another database.
• URL Length

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Questions Time!