| One of the most basic functions of preparing the workspace for document management and group collaboration involves configuring the Documents folder. Designing the folder structure takes us back to some of the original questions we faced when drilling down into the business goals of the project. -
How are documents organized? By type? iFilter? Group? -
Who can view them? Edit them? Add more? -
What steps should be taken prior to publishing documents? Then, how should it actually be published? -
How important is tracking the history of a document? -
Are check-in or check-out of documents a concern? -
Are enhanced folders otherwise required, or are standard folder adequate? -
How are index updates scheduled? -
How are search scopes defined and created? Figure 20.2. This table illustrates each folder type, and features supported.  Best Practices Approach to Developing the Workspace While the preceding points and many others must be addressed, ABC Company took a "best practices" approach to developing their workspace. For example, they were able to leverage the Base Document profile (a template) for the bulk of their documents, as they had created a simple folder layout. ABC also brought in a number of functional specialists familiar with their content, so as to find data patterns that aided in organizing this content. Then they locked down document profiles and metadata properties to ensure that consistency was maintained (which, therefore, improved search results). ABC Company also determined that Web Discussions would provide a superior mechanism for collaboration than had previously been enjoyed. Just the fact that SharePoint Portal Server would consolidate comments on a document in one location would save ABC countless man-hours, while simultaneously forcing a single discussion rather than the many multi-threaded discussions they tended to have when reviewing documents via email. Finally, ABC migrated their two remaining Lotus Notes databases to Microsoft-based solutions, and benefited in a number of ways ”note that while this was not required from a SharePoint Portal Server perspective, it helped push an otherwise stalled IT migration and ultimately reduced the number/diversity of supported IT crawl sources and integration points, thereby reducing their total cost of ownership (TCO) over the long run on many different fronts.  |
