I was working with a group of folks the other day who wanted to redesign the site. They had a lot of ideas for one page. They had no ideas for the data that supported what they wanted to present on that page. The site collection already has very poor architecture. When one goes to the root site to the site collection, that person gets two redirections to the final page on a subsite. Whoever created it that way caused all of the lists and libraries on the root site to go untouched for about a year.
In my discussions with them, I had to give them the analogy of a kitchen remodel. One doesn’t just put in a new kitchen. You need plans. You need to do demolition work. You need to account for the electrical, gas, and plumbing that you cannot move. You also need to figure out what you are going to keep from your cabinets. They had a good 30 or more lists and libraries that hadn’t been touched. I’m not going to just leave those defunct lists and libraries there. A new page would be a mere façade over a weak structure.
Over the coming weeks, they are to look at the existing content and identify what they are going to keep and what they want to kill. This is always the first step in redesign work with SharePoint: Knowledge Curation. It could be information curation, but we need to identify why and they are vetting the value of the information, so I elevate this to knowledge. They aren’t just checking to see if something is properly tagged. They are doing more than content management, and it is grunt work because no one had previously built the tools for them to sift through it more easily. To learn more about knowledge curation, here is an article I looked up from KM World.
The next step will be to identify the data definitions of those things they would like to present on the page like pictures on a carousel. I’d rather them not need to do a lot of work to keep their content there, so they need to identify what determines whether or not a picture will be displayed, how they want to add a new picture, if they link, etc.
We will go about creating their content management plan and will have a section for knowledge curation. It should be a continuous process, not something you do once a year. It is like brushing your teeth daily versus getting a scaling once a year by your dentist because the plaque looks like you have fused your teeth together. At some point, your dentist will recommend pulling your teeth and getting you dentures. This is why you see so many people start over with SharePoint sites. They neglect them for so long, they would rather just build a new one. It takes discipline, and it takes a plan.
Scott Brewster works for Data Analytics Solutions. He is got his Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM) credentials through the Knowledge Management Institute (KMI), and he has been working on both the farm administration and front end solution architecture of SharePoint since 2008.