Being an Information Manager...

Sharepoint

I was disappointed by Vista, but Sharepoint is another story. I think Microsoft is definitely up to something that can help with continuing the domination of the office world.

The Sharepoint idea is that everything can be workspace on the web, where you (as a user) do not have to worry about formatting, or managing the links - all you need to know is how to manage your content. You can be in MS Office, publish a document to your workspace (or your team's space) and invite others for review. Creating content & publishing becomes one and websites are not longer separate elements, but integrated as part of the environment where all users can share information.

This works for managing the intranet, because web sites become part of everybody's information sharing, while at the same time reducing the clutter in terms of look & feel. This also works for finding information (as opposed to Windows Explorer ...), since suddenly everything become a web site and therefore searchable. Like with Vista, Microsoft has invested a lot in this search element, since they feel the heat from Google and in this case they may be able to win, since they still dominate the desktop.

So instead of saving on a shared drive you can publish your content on the web - straight from your office tools and that can be very powerful. The courage you need to have as an Information Manager is to get rid of the shared drives at the same time, since this can easily replace it.

There are some flaws as well ...

• I was already disappointed about the hierarchical nature of the folder structures as we know it - and which continues to exist in Vista. Unfortunately Sharepoint is also based on this ... It would have been better to make the structure flat and use unique identifiers. So it is hard to change the structure without breaking links
• It is too easy to create a lots of navigation & empty pages without any content - so users may loose the way very easily. It is hard to get an easy site map created for managing the content.
• The templates can be too much a straight-jacket as well, creating lots of useless links (to various sub-sites you don't need most of the time)
• there is no hit-counter - you would like to see if content is read, but right now you can't

But it is a good step foreward, especially because they seem to integrate it with other products are well (e.g. MS Project). We'll watch the developments!

Labels: Microsoft, search, Sharepoint

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 5:26 AM 0 comments

Vista

Last year I was looking forward to the introduction of the new version of the Microsoft operating system ... Vista, but unfortunately I was a bit disappointed when it was finally released. They definitely worked hard on the graphics (think Apple ...), security and the search capabilities (they feel the heat from Google ...), but from an information management perspective they have missed the opportunity to make a major step forwards.

What could they have done?

• Get rid of the hierarchical folders - information does not relate to a single subject! How do I store pictures that relate to a place, a person, a date, ...?? The concept of virtual folders is still too cumbersome
• Introduce automatic tagging - why not propose tags when you store a document, or have features like in this Blog (when I add tags it can show my list of tags I've used before). This is not rocket science. There is meta data in all Microsoft files, but this is still cumbersome and not related to anything.
• Integrate the meta data from many products. Why not have your contacts in Outlook available as tags, and as virtual folders, ... etc.?

Just some ideas for Mr Gates - if he likes to have a chat about this he can always send a comment to this Blog!

Labels: Microsoft, tagging, Vista

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 4:47 AM 0 comments