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SPC14: Designing and applying information architecture for SharePoint and Office 365

Max Melcher

2 minute read

This session will demonstrate a proven process for defining, designing, implementing and governing your information architecture (IA). IA is more than just columns and metadata. You will learn how the different components available in SharePoint and Office 365 can be leveraged to their fullest potential and your users’ ultimate benefit to content organization and discovery.

Session “Designing and applying information architecture for SharePoint and Office 365” by Agnes Molnar and Israel Vega Jr.

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Here are my notes.

Information Architecture (IA)

IA: The art and science of organizing and labeling content

Three points to think about when designing an Information Architecture.

  1. Try to determine your cost when user do not find documents vs. the cost of finding
  2. Cost of development
  3. Value of learning

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Governance

You need (to establish) a convention how to name documents and define a structure where to put them – keep your SharePoint clean.

IA Components

Search has the problem that it needs to find things that humans created.

Don’t rename adjust the Document Content Type – instead inherit from it and create at least a “My Document” (my = company).

It is always very sad when a SharePoint Farm dies – I cry (Israel Vega)

Minimal Components are: Content Types, Navigation, Taxonomy, Site Structure, Site Types.

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Plan Plan Plan!

  1. Plan Migration (Inventory what you have, Cloud?)
  2. Plan Structure (Sites, Host Headers, Cloud Strategy)
  3. Plan Information Lifecycle

Make Search Better

Key message: SharePoint Search is really good, User need to take care of the document/metadata quality otherwise Search has no chance.

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Search is the key - I totally agree.

Summary

Very very solid session  - totally liked what Agnes and Israel presented. Their experience in this area is outstanding, I follow Agnes on twitter and she shares so many good articles how to layout a good Architecture – for me as a technical person she highlights how to focus on the not so technical problems. Seeing her on stage in combination with Israel was good fun!

The presentation style was – WOW – supporting slides, nice pictures – that was my most valuable session so far (so good, I could not write everything down, notes are not complete).

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