| The Training department at SmallTime has grown over the last year, from offering a few limited classes and other periods of instruction to now providing nearly daily training across more than 50 of SmallTime's future, current, and older product lines. Managing the curriculum in terms of updates and revisions has simply gotten out of hand. Their enormous folder structure approach to managing documents has quite plainly become an inefficient document management solution. The current conglomeration and patch quilt of content does not lend itself to organizing documents, publishing new classroom materials, or collaborating on new training projects. Business Goals and Requirements The department head of Training has seen and heard how other organizations at SmallTime have leveraged SharePoint Team Services or Portal Server to better share and manage documents. He believes that SharePoint will solve his own document management system, or DMS, challenges. After talking it over with his IT liaison, they immediately create a small task force aimed at implementing the cost effective SharePoint solution. They believe that maintaining a central "library" of training materials and better organizing this library's document folder structure will facilitate -
Automated publication processes -
Standardized methods of identifying and classifying infor mation -
Controlled access to documents -
Distribution of content management throughout the department Support Organization and Solutions Architecture The IT liaison works up quick sizing guidelines via Microsoft's SharePoint Planning and Installation Guide, and procures from the central IT group a single SmallTime-standard four-CPU server, with 2GB of RAM, enough drives for nearly 400GB of data, and all required software resources. He also procures three additional servers earmarked for crawling and searching (see Figure 21.4). Within a day, he has the hardware installed and configured, the OS and service packs loaded, all prerequisites installed, and SharePoint Portal Server itself installed. Figure 21.4. SmallTime's Training department benefits from a highly scalable Document Management server and an architecture that moves processor- and disk- intensive searching and crawling to incremental dedicated SPS servers.  No doubt, the solution from a capacity-planning perspective is "super- sized ," but everyone is comfortable that no upgrades or other infrastructure- related changes will need to occur for a year or more. Additionally, this will nicely address the seasonal peaks in activity throughout the year, especially at quarter-end, that strain SmallTime's computing environment today. DMS Workspace Considerations After performing the install, the IT liaison then created the initial workspace, called it "Training", and selected the Training team lead as the workspace contact. When the document management system's workspace was created, a number of automatic events occurred, including -
SharePoint Portal Server created a dashboard site associated with the new Training workspace. -
SharePoint Portal Server automatically assigned the IT liaison the Coordinator role on the workspace node. -
The team leader's email address became the address to which SharePoint Portal Server would send replies from subscription notifications. Reviewing the Current Folder Structure After the workspace was created, the IT liaison began planning a redesign of his Training department's current folder structure to take maximum advantage of these new document management capabilities. He wanted to fully leverage SharePoint Portal Server's document access control, versioning capabilities, and support for approval routing to assist the Training group in publishing new materials. He also discovered that document profiles would allow the team to apply searchable metadata to documents, thereby making them easier to access. The IT liaison leveraged the assistance of his colleague in Product Support to discuss ways of moving content from the current folders and other sources into the new SharePoint Portal Server workspace. Together, they determined that the quickest way to move their existing content into the workspace would be to drag and drop the existing folder hierarchy right into the workspace. However, that would not solve the problems with the existing folder structure ”it would still remain a cumbersome and difficult folder hierarchy if used in this way. Building the Folder Structure Team Starting from the beginning and reorganizing the folders was the best way to go. The IT liaison knew he could not do this on his own, though. Sure, it would be easy to come up with a folder structure that made sense to him, but not being an actual trainer himself put him at a severe disadvantage in terms of knowing what made sense for the trainers and other folks tasked with actually using the DMS. The current folder structure had obviously evolved over time into the cumbersome mess that existed today. Different teams had sought to organize and classify documents as they saw fit over the last few years , and many inconsistencies, redundancies, and strange hierarchies existed as a result. Some of the folder names no longer even reflected their content, and other folders were long abandoned and simply remained empty today. The SharePoint Portal Server deployment seemed a good opportunity to re-evaluate the Training group's document management practices and overall method of organizing content. The IT liaison's colleague in Product Support pointed out that he could use the capabilities of SharePoint Portal Server to make this task easier, too. The IT liaison went back to his Training department head, and asked that a special project team consisting of training content experts and senior instructors be created. The "FixIt" team, as they came to be known, wound up consisting of just enough folks to provide sound DMS ideas, approaches, and background data, but not so many as to get in the way of quick decision making ”five. After convening for the first time the next day, they determined that they would need to immerse themselves in the data for a few days, to get a feel for their real document management needs and challenges. Metadata and the Existing Folder Structure Once the FixIt team had a sense of document types, categories, and profiles, they needed to nail down profiles such that a set of properties could be created to describe a document within the profile. The group converted many of the valid and useful folder names that currently existed into properties for use on document profiles. They also deleted empty and obsolete folders. They did not, however, address the need to remove or archive old documents ”that would be outside the scope of their team mission, and would only serve to slow them down and put the real project at hand on hold. Perhaps later, another team would be assembled to address archiving. For each new document profile, the team worked to create a list of properties that identified the associated documents. Specifically, they used the Add Document Profile Wizard to create the newly defined document profiles. This was time-consuming at first, but eventually they settled on a smaller number of document profiles than originally envisioned . As all document profiles were ultimately stored in the Management folder in the workspace, each of the designated folder Coordinators could then easily select from among the existing document profiles to associate them with a folder. Reducing the Document Profile List As the FixIt team waded through all of their documents to get a feel for their own document management requirements, they felt a need to be very thorough when identifying the different types of documents. However, the identification of 50 different "configuring product" document profiles for 50 different product lines quickly got out of hand. So the team revisited their list, and consolidated many of the document profiles simply to reduce the list size . As a bonus, they also found redundancies that could be eliminated, and observed trends that further allowed them to reduce the list. TIP In effect, they discovered the hard way that it is critical to find a balance between the number of document profiles to choose from, and the raw number of choices in document profiles. Too many profiles only serve to confuse authors, and they prove difficult for Coordinators to manage as well. On the flip side, though, too few document profiles equate to more properties on the profile.
To allow for rapid document check-ins, the team also decided to limit required properties to only five per document profile. In summary, FixIt wound up reducing the number of folders, minimizing the number of document profiles, and adding custom properties to the remaining document profiles. They also discussed later adding incremental properties so as to capture information that was not previously associated with each document. Building the Folder Structure Finally, the time has come to create the new folder structure that has been developed based on team consensus. This is completed within a few hours, and the next step becomes apparent ”they must move all of their documents into the new workspace, ensuring that each document is appropriately inserted into the new folder structure. But it is not a simple matter of dragging documents from one folder structure to the new. That is just not feasible , and the team becomes concerned that the time required to manually move each document will keep them busy for weeks. And of course there is the matter of completing the document profiles as well. After again consulting with his Product Support colleague, the Training team's IT liaison takes it upon himself to customize the script that the Product Support folks used to accomplish the same task. It is a custom script, but straightforward in that its goal is to import documents into a SharePoint workspace from an existing folder hierarchy. He carefully analyzes the script, and reads over the SharePoint Portal Server Software Development Kit (SDK) as required for clarification . A new script is developed and tested . Within a few hours, he has successfully copied all of the files from the legacy folder structure into the new workspace, both mapping them into the proper new folders and updating the document profiles for each document.  To read in detail about folder hierarchies, see "Creating and Configuring Your Folder Hierarchy," p. 262. The FixIt team reviews the work and verifies that the script indeed worked as planned. The script is saved for future use (in the event that additional documents that must be added to the workspace come to light in the future), and the FixIt team is dissolved. Mission accomplished. Security Considerations Before the folder structure sub-project kicked off, the IT liaison manually assigned the team leader's user account to the Coordinator role on the workspace node, using SharePoint Portal Server Administration. The team leader was now able to assign roles to folders that inherit security from the workspace node in the workspace. The team leader also needed his backup to have Coordinator permissions on the workspace node, too. So he assigned his user name to the Coordinator role as well, using SharePoint Portal Server Administration just as the IT liaison had shown him. At this point, the backup had Coordinator permissions and could perform the same actions on the workspace that his team leader could perform. This offloaded quite a burden from the team leader, and allowed for security considerations to be addressed in either member's absence. Note that the backup is automatically a Coordinator on every SharePoint folder that inherits its security from the workspace node. The only difference is that the team leader also happens to be the workspace contact, and as such receives subscription-related emails, while his backup does not. To simplify the process of securing access to the folders, additional group team leaders responsible for authoring and publishing were also assigned the Coordinator role. This allowed them to further assign roles to more of the individual trainers within their own teams, such as senior instructors and so on. By delegating the task of managing security to the folks that understood the day-to-day security needs of the team, the overall burden of security management was both distributed and reduced throughout the Training department. And everyone benefited from the faster security turnaround when the need arose to modify access, properties, and roles. Go-Live Considerations At this point, the SharePoint Portal Server DMS solution is ready to begin accepting and managing documents. The IT liaison coordinates some basic "Introduction to SharePoint DMS" training for his colleagues, and ensures that all operations tasks are addressed by central IT. He also reviews the approval process put in place by the team leaders and senior instructors, by taking a look at the Approval tab on the Properties page of each the folder. While he did not know all of the business processes involved in approval routing, he figured that as long as the appropriate team leader had at least modified these settings from the defaults, the process would be set up and capable of being modified later. Thus, with all of the above tasks completed, the Training department is ready to leverage the following: -
The new folder structure is both simplified and reorganized -
All content from the various legacy folders have been moved into the workspace and applied document profiles. -
Document profiles have been created and minimized, allowing custom properties to be included to better identify documents without complicating publishing -
Approval routing was set up and verified to some extent -
Roles were distributed throughout the department to both secure content in each folder, and facilitate making rapid changes to security settings and applying new security changes as required by the team Now that the underlying work in terms of preparing the folder structure, addressing security, putting the workspace in place, and so on has been addressed, the Training department is ready for the next step ”preparing the dashboard site. The team will meet over the next several days to work out details regarding layout, features of the home page, adding and configuring specific Web Parts that will add value for them, and more. The team looks forward to this phase of the project, realizing that the tedious work is behind them now. From start to finish, just over three weeks have elapsed between the time that the Training department head met with his IT liaison, and the trainers within the department were provided access to their full-featured SharePoint Portal Server document management solution. SmallTime is well on their way to taking advantage of documentation management big time!  | 
