As you plan out the Sitemap and Taxonomy for Your SharePoint deployment, it’s important to remember that establishing a logical over-arching Site Structure for your corporate intranet must take precedence over the temptation to implement the latest trends in in personalization and Social Networking technology. Sure, we’re all excited and impressed by the ways that the latest innovations in the Social Network have impacted the way we communicate and stay connected with one another, but that does not mean that turning the Home page of your corporate intranet into a personalized dashboard replete with Facebook-like activity feeds is right way to display the new technologies available to you. Don’t get me wrong, I do find these cutting edge Social Data fed bulletin boards and personalized employee-2-employee communications tools to be useful and compelling; however, they must be utilized carefully as an integrated part of an overall holistic design that supports both the needs of the business and the design constraints of the software platform; for if we fail to plan the sitemap in such a way that supports both the strong and weak aspects of the MS platform itself, then we fail to provide the usability of the communications tools that we sought to promote in the first place. You should always bear in mind the IA’s motto “IT Depends” which refers to the fact that there are no hard and fast “ten commandments” of good information architecture; instead, there are 15-20 flexible heuristics that by necessity change on a case by case basis depending upon the context of the information in focus.
I think You all know what a sitemap is (a diagram depicting the hierarchical relationships between sites, sub-sites, and content nesting structures – sometimes a tree hierarchy \ other times more of an organically evolving hub and spoke model illustrating nodes of data (lists, menus) and their leaves (web pages and applications); however, you may not be as familiar with the meaning of ‘taxonomy’. Well be perfectly honest taxonomy is a high visibility buzz-word that is often mis-used and certainly means different things to different people. At its core it is about labeling and indexing of global navigation tabs, links, and content so that people can find what they’re looking for. Taxonomy =The labeling and indexing structure of the application; taxonomy as it pertains to web sites is a library science adaptation of the original biological term describing the naming convention for plant & animal kingdoms AND as it applies to SharePoint, the taxonomy is a combination of UI sitemap and the unique nomenclature ascribed to the data nesting, hierarchy, and metadata of the application.
IF you are assigned as or have access to an Information Architecture planning resource, THEN You need to understand that MS SharePoint is really 3 applications bundled together on one web delivery platform: Publishing (CMS), Collaboration (Team Sites), and Personalization (My Sites). Some of the enhancements that MS SharePoint 2010 has provided really well are to extend the MOSS ’07 functionality by making enhanced Social Networking features formerly available only within the personalization\ my Sites Sphere now extended to improve employee to employee communications within the Collaboration Sphere (these are tools like ‘ask a question,’ ‘noteboard,’ and ‘people finder’ that originated in the MOSS Personalization sphere and have been observed with greater depth in other best of breed Social Sites like Facebook and Digg out on the larger playing field of public-facing web apps). What SharePoint 2010 still does not do very well (or even at all without extensive custom development) is to extend all of the individual users ‘My Host’ social data across multiple site collections and roll them up to web parts and activity feeds that can be exposed on the top-level Home page.
The architectural reasons for these limitations are 1) that “SharePoint wants the top-level site collection to be an internally public facing publishing site” - this includes the entry level Home page and any additional web-pages contained within that top-level site before linking off into Collaboration and Personalization sites that may be available under global navigation tabs or links off of the home page. And 2) Personalized Content typically displayed on the lower level My Site home pages cannot easily be extended to or exposed upon the top-level (publishing) Home page for every individual User to see differently via dynamic content population via their profile preferences (these functions were designed by MS to take place at a lower level in the system architecture within the separate individual My Sites) or either by redirect to that individual’s My Site home , including web parts like “my favorite links,” “my teams,” “my RSS feeds,” “my News” “my Weather” “People I am following” (my Friends), “Sites I am a member of” (sites I have joined or am following). See the illustrations above for further guidance on the MS application spheres of influence Vis a Vis the MS governance Pyramid (which directly impacts the custom development model).
In My next Blog Post we will take a close look at what the alternatives to these development constraints are and discuss how to best work around the obstacles presented by each opportunity that these challenges present us with. We’ll look at the potential success and possible failure points of each of the logical options such as “Can I make everyone’s individual My Site dashboard the official home page of the Intranet?, and if so, what would that data nesting structure look like with the content that typically resides at the bottom of the pyramid being elevated to the top? “Can I display personalized content on the home page (not by re-directing to the My Site Home for every one of my 50,000 users, but instead by exposing personalized content web parts from the individual employee’s My Sites’ site collections on the overall Publishing home page? – can I then combine that with some feature stapled Internal Marketing web parts that I want everyone to see like “Company News” and “CEO’s Corner - A Message from Our Leadership?), and Lastly, we’ll take a closer look at the opportunities being opened up by third party innovators like Newsgator and bamboo Solutions.
