What to put onto sharepoint?

Question

I am employed by a medium size company in financial the area with approx 10 areas.. Compliance, IT, Sales..

I've built around 14 subsites to allow document storage and each subsite has 6 indentical headings. Audit, Documents, Meetings, MI, Policies, Processes, Contracts. These are document libraries, below these I have folders. I am to start populating these folders shortly.

Currently data is stored on network drives, local drives. Some go back many years and are reference material only. We are intending to keep network drives on a read only basis.

Marketing which includes, product information, graphic design have many files stored. These are jpgs, psd, working files.. and so on. They are concerned over the vastness of information they have and its a huge job to put material onto sharepoint, is there a real advantage for old work.

I too am concerned as it wont provide any real benefit and could lead to single point of failure.. I guess that’s another conversation.

The structure I mentioned earlier ( Audit, Documents, Meetings, MI, Policies, Processes, Contracts) seams good but this information is at a higher level and not working documents... This is my observation... Could someone provide clarity in what documents should be stored on Sharepoint, particularly if we’re starting to use the system.

In terms of documents am i correct in thinking that there is a distinction between private working data (lower level) and widely used data (higher level), I've probably used the wrong terminology here..

thanks

Answer 1

If they would benefit from having versioning, workflows, or adding some metadata to the jpg/psd, etc. files then SharePoint might be suitable.

However, pictures tend to be large in size, so having tens of megabytes per image and lots of images will lead to huge SharePoint databases as all files are (by default) stored in SharePoint content database.

Also, depending on the software that is used to work with the jpg/psd-files, the software might be able to directly open the files from SharePoint (over WebDAV). If not, then it is really much effort to first download the file, modify it, then upload it back.

If the marketing would still have their dedicated workspace in SharePoint, but you would just decide that these "special files" will be stored in a network share. Perhaps make the marketing site a central hub that can include all aspects that SharePoint is good at (tasks, textual documents, calendar, contact lists, etc.) and link to these specific network folders from that workspace.

So, I would perhaps not put all marketing files to SharePoint, only the ones that make sense.

Also, it might be a good idea to include all file shares in SharePoint search. Create own scope for them and call it "Old content", or just "Stuff from file shares" and people can benefit from SharePoint search even if they haven't competely moved over to using SharePoint.

Answer 2

Having worked with SharePoint at quite a few large (F500) organizations - I'd like to share a few points by stating it's not just documents but how these are packaged and used:

• Metadata management with Taxonomy features provide great benefits with classifying and searching content. Build taxonomies pertaining to your organization and its business or alternately, explore 3rd-party offerings lik Wand .
• Search facilties (along with metadata mentioned above) goes a very long way. SharePoint search can be extended with other products like FAST server (based upon your requirements).
• Provided consistency in business processes by using workflows: For e.g., for a client's marketing department - SP workflow ensured that marketing content had approval for public release and sharing with other users.
• Explore other business uses of SharePoint. A good source is CMS Wire. Recent insights showed the use of social networks, front-end web server (using SP branding) and mobile content.
• For more document intensive deployment - 3rd party tools like Vizit can make your end user more productive.

(caveat to the above: I am not associated with Wand nor Vizit. I have used their tools and found them to be quite satisfactory).

Good Luck!