Do you sometimes think of SharePoint as a great dumping ground? You upload a document and keep your fingers crossed that you can remember where you put it? Or maybe you go to a site to find something only to be bombarded by pages of folders hiding mountains of documents and no idea how to find the one thing you’re looking for.
It seems to me that when we moved from filing cabinets to computers we forgot how to organize, or, maybe more that we never updated our thinking about organizing information beyond files and folders.
The amount of information we consume is ever increasing and for many of us we cannot just stop reading and writing to reduce the electronic clutter in our lives. We need to find more efficient ways to manage the information we receive and produce. Can SharePoint solve these problems? Well… solve might be a little too strong of a word but it sure can help!
First things, first, we must PLAN for organization.
Plan, PLAN, PLAN
Yes, I know planning has become a dirty word in the work place. I do agree that many times we are stuck in planning ruts, but, a little planning now will help a whole bunch later. Before you create another folder in a file share or site or list in SharePoint ask yourself these questions:
- Who will need to modify or add to this information other than me?
- What will I do this information once I’m done using it? (Will it be deleted and never needed again, does it need to stick around in case someone else might need it, or will it go to another person who will make changes to it)
- Where can I locate other related information?
- When do I need to make decisions related to this information?
- Why would other need to know or care about this information?
- How can I use this information most effectively?
If the information you have or are working on will need to have multiple peoples input SharePoint is and should be your go-to option. After all, it is what SharePoint started out with and it is still what is does best. COLLABORATION. How many times have you created a document and sent it in email to a group of people asking for input just to get back 4 or 5 copies of your same document that you now have to manually merge with your original, yuck! SharePoint let’s you collaborate online and using the same document, keeping track of changes in one place.
If the information you are working with will need to be referenced in the future, again SharePoint is an excellent option. With full search capabilities and the ability to sort, filter and view information in several ways SharePoint can make referencing information easy. I recently worked with an operations team to get a list, an invoice list, into SharePoint. They were having a tough time keeping track of what invoices where sent out, when they were sent and which ones were still outstanding. We turned that one tiny idea, moving a list from paper to SharePoint into a really clean and efficient tracker for that group that ended up saving their company millions. In addition to the money they were now able to enable an approval process they had been trying to get off the ground. With easy to search lists that could be filtered and sorted depending on who was looking at the invoices sales people and managers could easily find information they were looking for or needed to approve of.
Okay, okay, I’m getting a bit off topic. I think the point I really want to get across here is, we all have TONS of information we’re trying to keep track of and we’re not going to be able to ignore it, but we can make it a little easier to manage by using organizational tools, like SharePoint to filter, sort, search and group information. I’ve used a couple examples to explain how organization can happen in the land of SharePoint. To learn more check out these resources:
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