Introduction
In this book, you will learn why Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is important and how it can be implemented utilizing the SharePoint platform. When you have completed reading the book, you will have the comfort level to know how to implement ECM inside of SharePoint and to understand why you are doing it. This will also help you bridge the gaps in communication between technology and business needs that exist in most organizations.
As you read the book, you will find that there is more emphasis placed on ECM principles than there is on SharePoint 2013. This is intentional, because as you will soon learn, trying to achieve ECM by simply turning on and configuring SharePoint features is completely the wrong approach. Until you fully understand ECM, you don’t stand a chance of making SharePoint’s features useful to deploy an ECM solution.
Our research, and more importantly, our practical experience have shown that the difference between successful ECM projects and disasters always points to a people or planning problem. Very often, business users are demanding an ECM solution and expect IT departments to implement it. Without a clear understanding of why they are implementing an ECM solution, IT takes the approach of setting up a SharePoint farm, enabling most, if not all, available features, and leaving the rest to the user. Or, it’s taken one step further, and they attempt to configure content management functionality such as versioning and managed metadata, without the guidance from the knowledge workers. This is the definition of “knowing enough to be dangerous.”
This results in a SharePoint farm configured, standard features enabled, and users given access. Left to their own devices, users will often blame IT for not seeing what they are looking for, and IT will be stuck without a clue about where to make changes.
Let’s hope that at this point the organization gets a clue and does a reset on the project. If not, one of two things can happen: first, the users will not use the system and default to what they did before, and in a year the deployment will be chalked up to failure; or second, the system does get adopted but in a rapid way that mirrors all the mistakes that occur from the use of shared network drives. This is called SharePoint sprawl and results in site proliferation and/or the webification of already poorly managed shared drives.
The catalyst for these problems is a language gap between IT and business users. When an outside ECM consultant asks you to do an inventory of how knowledge workers operate within your organization, it seems like a mundane and overtly simple question.
However, interestingly enough, when you approach a knowledge worker, requesting a complete description of how they do their job, often the results are a trickle of ideas about the particular tasks a knowledge worker completes in a day, but not really how they are executed. When tasks become routine, their details disappear. This vanishing act results in oversimplification on the part of the knowledge workers of what it takes to manage these tasks. The result is that the IT team has no clearer picture of how content is consumed in the organization than the knowledge workers do, yet everyone’s expectations for automation are extremely high.
It is comforting to know that there are very few aspects of ECM that can’t be automated, streamlined, and improved with SharePoint 2013. But until an organization knows how the technology fits into their specific modes of operation, it’s impossible to go from zero to a successful SharePoint ECM solution.
We are suggesting that planning is the key ingredient to get right early on in ECM projects. But planning usually fails. This is most often because organizations are too nearsighted to do it, because the wrong people are asked to implement ECM, and because the communication between the users and implementers is poor.
Who this book is for
Whether you are a business analyst, IT manager, decision maker, or knowledge worker, by the end of this book you will all be on the same page, speaking the same language, and able to push forward with a proper ECM project. To that end, this book will be part technical and part philosophical. The methodologies of ECM will be followed up with technical examples of how this is accomplished in ECM. This mapping is the exact link that is too often missing in most projects. IT gets the technical SharePoint pieces, and knowledge workers, whether they can state it or not, know the methods of working with the content that SharePoint will be processing and managing.
In addition, we have included a CloudShare demo environment that contains the Information Architecture (IA) discussed extensively in this book.
If you are a business user, you might be tempted to skip the technical bits; please don’t. The cursory knowledge of the SharePoint terms and implementation will help you communicate clearly, understand the reasons why SharePoint is being implemented a specific way, and ultimately enable you to get what you want out of the ECM solution.
If you are technical, you might be tempted to skip ahead to the technical pieces and address only those topics that relate to your current project. If so, this is a red flag that your ECM project has already failed and that you are not looking at the solution holistically.
The use cases and labs are meant to help get you started and are in no way designed as a step-by-step guide for building a complete solution. We highly recommend that you read the early chapters first so that you can understand the concepts and best practices for designing and building an ECM solution. Otherwise, you will likely put the technical aspects of SharePoint ahead of the operational business and people aspects of a successful ECM Project.
Ideally, every ECM project stakeholder in your organization will read this book. The project sponsor, power users, IT manager, business analyst, legal counsel, and records management teams will find this as glue to guide the successful execution of the project.
Assumptions about you
The basic assumption of this book is that your organizations needs content management and that you are a stakeholder in getting a content management system deployed. The second primary assumption is that you already own, or will soon own, SharePoint and that your goal is to use SharePoint as the platform for building the required ECM solution.
There are several versions of SharePoint. While most of what is discussed in this book will be relevant for all versions of SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, both on-premises and in Office 365, the specifics will focus on SharePoint 2013 on-premises standard version or higher. The methodology and process will be relevant whichever version of SharePoint you use. However, if you have SharePoint foundation versions, you will not be able to implement many of the functions required.
Organization of this book
Chapter 1, begins with a structured definition of ECM. We believe that this will help everyone in the organization use the same nomenclature and concepts. These definitions rely heavily on existing bodies of work that have been established to create a common understanding for ECM professionals to communicate, design, and deploy ECM solutions in a standard and methodical way.
As we move to Chapter 2, we cover all the aspects of ECM that pertain to the proper capture and storage of content in SharePoint. Next, in Chapter 3, we cover all the processes associated with properly managing that content throughout its life cycle so that it can provide the most usefulness to the organization. These two chapters will cover all the ECM basics that will require the bulk of your attention and the overall time needed for the planning, implementation, and deployment of your ECM project. These are equally important parts of the ECM stack, but they cover very different subject areas and bodies of knowledge. Therefore, first we discuss how to capture, store, and process content, and then we dive into managing, delivering, and preserving content using SharePoint as the core of your ECM solution.
Now that we have established the same definitions and broken your ECM solution into two distinct stacks, we move on to Chapter 4. The sections included in this chapter are designed to provide examples that you can point to for best practices as you design your ECM solution. Business processes are never exactly the same for every organization; every Accounts Payable department has unique aspects in how they process work. They might all pay bills, but they do so using a variety of policies, approval methods, financial applications, and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Note the word “Generally”: these aren’t laws; they are just guidelines. The same goes for other areas that you are planning to address by deploying SharePoint content management technologies and ECM policies and principles.
As we stated earlier, building a successful ECM solution requires a focus on people. In Chapter 5, we help you identify the right people for your project. To do this, we have provided guidance to help you define specific roles and responsibilities and embrace the need for professional project management. We recommend strongly that you have a PMI certified individual responsible for managing the project from beginning to end. It is also important to identify the technical team members and outline specific subject matter experts who will be responsible for delivering on all the technical requirements outlined in a detailed project plan and architecture design. Finally, we touch on quality control; this will help you understand the importance of unit-testing every deliverable.
Regardless of how well the project is planned, managed, and tested, it will never achieve the desired results without the sections we include in Chapter 6. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have no idea why I do this; IT said that’s how it works”? Involving users to provide feedback about usability and helping you to understanding how to listen, not just take notes, will be the one thing you point back to and say that’s what made the difference. We will discuss how to incorporate change management practices and create motivation for users. In the end, it might come down to your ability to lead and change user behavior that will enable the ECM solution to manage content easily.
To help you kick your ECM project into high gear, in Chapter 7, we include a complete outline of our recommended IA. You will see that we come back to IA many times during the book; this should illustrate why it is so important. We will cover the importance of governance for the project and the use of the platform as it relates not only to SharePoint but also to content that is used throughout your organization.
The principles covered in Chapter 8, and Chapter 9, might not be familiar to everyone. However, they are extremely important to understand and, if possible, to include in your ECM solution. Many organizations find out how important these features and the policies needed to implement them effectively are only after a negative litigation, audit, or regulatory event happens.
We round out the book in Chapter 10, and Chapter 11, by covering some additional areas of interest, including Office 365 and SharePoint user groups. We have also included access to a CloudShare development environment that is a preconfigured SharePoint 2013 environment with the various features and IA discussed in the book, implemented with sample documents.
The purpose of the CloudShare environment is twofold. First, it’s to allow the reader to have hands-on access to a SharePoint farm to actually play with the features discussed in the book. The second reason is to foster the best practice of having a sandboxed SharePoint farm when you do any planning, testing, and implementation work. The reader can take the development environment and use it to expand their own ECM design, demonstrate to various stakeholders how certain features will work, or customize it to be more similar to their specific requirements.
CloudShare offers a time-limited trial, with subscriptions starting at a low monthly cost. We recommend that you, at minimum, utilize the trial so that you have access to the virtual environments at your leisure while you read this book.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the following people for helping us. Their support and contributions are greatly appreciated.
Shad
Shad
The time spent writing this book was substantial and occurred mostly on nights and weekends. It meant sacrificing some pretty sweet powder days at Crystal Mountain with my son Cade or missing out on playing a game of Pokemon cards with my other son Jaxson. Whenever I would retreat to my office, I could hear the family activities occurring without me. Then a knock at the door with a hot cup of coffee, snack, or request to come eat a meal with the family would remind me how supportive my wife and boys were during this effort. I was rarely alone in my office, usually accompanied by either our dogs Luci and Lily at my feet or Chris Riley, who was working via Skype right alongside me. I would like to thank my family for supporting my decision to co-author this book. I had started a new business just a year before the opportunity to write the book came up, so they had already become used to Dad working seven days a week, including late nights and long weekends. My wife Michele is my best friend, and she keeps me honest about most everything I do. My sons are my heart and soul; I cannot thank them enough for letting Daddy focus and work on this book, mostly without interruption.
Chris Riley is downright brilliant, I hope everyone who reads this book has an opportunity to meet him and spend some time getting to know him. He hasn’t come by any of his knowledge or core values easily; he has worked tirelessly to achieve success and failure. The results are a person who has amassed a great body of technical knowledge and personal character. He asked me to be his co-author for this book, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity.
I would like to thank my parents Margaret and James White for teaching me that honesty and hard work are the core elements to success. My parents worked hard every day to create a stable and loving home for my sister Serena Kraft and me. My sister is a successful entrepreneur in Alaska, and we both acknowledge that it was core values more than anything that helped us achieve success in life.
Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank the following people who helped me in so many ways both during the process of writing the book and helping to support efforts that allowed me to write it. In addition, I have included individuals who I have worked with during my career that have had a lasting impact and helped shape my opinions about proper design, execution, and teamwork. These people are ECM professionals in their own right, and I am lucky to have worked with them: Kenyon Brown, Christopher Hearse, Jeff Shuey, Cullen Hower, Dennis Brooke, Mathias Eichler, Jeff Doyle, Bob Stellick, Robert Latham, John Dougherty, Al Senzamici, Phong Hoang, Ryan Keller, and Richard Norrell.
– Shadrach White
Chris
I first have to acknowledge the ECM gene for this book. Without the insatiable drive I have to organize vast amounts of information in a way that makes me consume information better and faster, I would never have jumped into ECM because—let’s face it—it’s a bit boring. Next I have to thank Shad. I’ve known Shad for many years now; we were introduced as industry peers but quickly became friends. We connect on the fact that the world, despite most Independent Software Vendor (ISV) assertions, is completely behind in technology adoption. He realized, as I have, that companies, although the technology is available, are just not adopting solutions in an effective way. We share the belief that there is no need to further complicate things. Instead, let’s make people successful. We also share a drive to help. We know what is possible. Not only because we have implemented it, but because we live it. Shad wants everyone to know this possibility.
One of the reasons I was able to meet Shad was due to a rock-hard industry that is fighting the daily battle of steering organizations correctly. That organization is AIIM. AIIM has been my surrogate industry parent. They have been the source of vast amounts of my applied knowledge in ECM as well as strong relationships that have catapulted my experience and career.
Another big chunk of my drive came from people I’ve never met but wish I had. These are the figureheads: James Gleick, Richard Feynman, Guy Kawasaki, Ray Kurzweil, and quite substantially, Steve Jobs. While they have not all been directly involved in ECM, they have contributed to my “style,” which is critical in my approach to all technical projects.
And finally, I have to thank my wife, Lauren. She sees how I obsessively organize files on my computer and allows me to speak about what to her might seem like gibberish—about the importance of information, avoiding information glut, and the desire to push the world forward into using that great technology that already exists. She is the records manager of my brain and forces me to do what I need to keep my mind from getting cluttered.
– Christopher Riley
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