SharePoint information architecture

The problem

A SharePoint environment that grows without a structure becomes an archive where everyone knows a document exists but not where it is. Nested folders, file names carrying information that should sit in a field, parallel versions, sites created for a project and never closed. The more documents come in, the fewer are found, and full-text search returns too much to be useful. The problem is not the amount of information: it is that nobody has decided how it is organised.

The solution

I reorganised and structured the company’s SharePoint environments starting from the information rather than from the sites: which document types exist, what tells them apart, who uses them and for what. From there a taxonomy, that is a shared vocabulary; categories that describe documents with metadata instead of position; document logic that says where a document is born, how it is classified and how it is found again. The structure is designed for the people who browse it every day, not for the person who drew it.

Technologies

• SharePoint
• Taxonomies and metadata
• Categories and document types
• Document logic: classification, search, browsing

The result

Large amounts of documents and information have become structures that are easy to browse: a document is found for what it is, not from the memory of where someone put it. The taxonomy and the categories stay valid as new documents come in, because they describe the company’s work and not the state of an archive at one moment. The work goes on as the environment grows: a document structure has to be maintained like every other part of the infrastructure.