Mastering SharePoint
Are you looking for a system to help you tackle the challenges of content management? Look no further than Microsoft’s SharePoint, an essential tool with the ability to store and manage documents, organise content and deliver content and files to your employees.
In this article, we’ll go over three tried and tested strategies that will help you step up your Microsoft SharePoint content management capabilities, so you can make the most of what SharePoint has to offer. After all, being aware of the features and processes you can create in SharePoint will let you take advantage of it, ensuring that your content management system is robust and works exactly how you want it to.
If you’re looking to get started with SharePoint but don’t know how to begin, get in contact with our team of experts today. We’re here to help, and to ensure that you’re equipped with everything you need to use SharePoint to its fullest potential within your organisation.
Strategy 1: Implement a Taxonomy and Metadata Framework
A taxonomy is a classification system, that can be used to group and categorise content to ensure that it’s relevant to your organisation’s aims and objectives. Making sure that you have a taxonomy will ensure that you have a strong foundation for content management and that everyone within your environment can easily find what they need.
For example, a legal department might create categories like “Contracts”, “Regulations”, and “Compliance”, whereas a videography team might have categories like “Raw Footage”, “Edits”, and “Assets”. Figuring out what categories within your taxonomy will help you ensure that you get the most out of it.
With this, using SharePoint’s managed metadata services to establish a central term store will ensure consistency throughout your team, making sure that everyone uses the right tags and terminology to prevent confusion. This means that ultimately, everyone can work in unison without anyone not knowing the correct terminology or where to find different categorised items.
Strategy 2: Automate Content Lifecycle Management
Every piece of content you create has a lifecycle, in which it will eventually become useless and will no longer need to be active. After all, having to scour through so many different files to find what they need will eventually take too much time for it to be reasonable. On top of this, having old content just lying around can be a compliance nightmare.
Using SharePoint to automate your content lifecycle management and ensure that it is carried out correctly is vital, as it will ensure you don’t face any of these problems. However, to use SharePoint for this, you’ll first need to define your company’s content management policies — how long different types of content should be retained, when they should be archived, and when they should be deleted.
Once you’ve created these policies, you can use SharePoint’s Information Management Policies to automatically enforce them. This means that you won’t need to manually intervene — everything will automatically be taken care of, letting you focus on more important aspects of your organisation.
Eventually, you can implement these into a wider workflow. This will include approval and publication of content and will ensure that content follows the lifecycle correctly, as well as making the process of version control and publication schedules far easier. With this, you can automate the whole publishing process and lifecycle, without needing to manually do it all.
Strategy 3: Leverage SharePoint Premium
SharePoint Premium is a must-have for any business truly looking to improve its content management. With the inclusion of AI and machine learning, SharePoint Premium can unlock a whole new axis to the world of content management — with new ways to automate tasks and analyse data.
In SharePoint Premium, you can create AI-powered models that automatically classify your content and extract valuable information, unlocking insights from your data without having to manually complete any tasks. For example, you could have a model see that a document is a contract plan, and have it extract all of the key data from the document that’s relevant to a contract — such as expiration dates and signees.
On top of this, SharePoint Premium lets you take advantage of no-code solutions when integrated with Power Automate, eliminating the need to know complicated code to be able to take advantage of the best features within SharePoint. These can trigger automatic action based on analysis and detection, meaning that you’ll never have to manually intervene.
These automated workflows can be set up in a few clicks, and can greatly streamline your content workflow. With this, you’ll be saving everyone time and also ensuring that every aspect of content management is taken care of.