By Marc Solomon, Knowledge Engineer at Avid Technology
March 02, 2011 - 9:14 PM
You know when you're a KM grunt? It's when the sheen of a cool new application pales in comparison to a core component that learns new tricks while maintaining its humble basic, unassuming identity. Sometimes it's the dull stuff that spares you the details you don't have to sweat. Sometimes the thrill of configuring on an enterprise scale the same daily regimen we're used to doing locally in our bathrobes attracts us to the dance floor a whole lot better than loud music and overpriced champagne.
I'm talking about my newfound friendship with SharePoint MySites. Whether you've turned your hard knocks down to mute or set your knock-knock default to "who's there" when the virtual cube mate comes poking, here's the good news about My Sites in SharePoint 2010. It does justice to two foundational ECM requirements that have been knocking about for some time:
The decades long battle by change agents to shift knowledge boundaries from email to collaboration tools.
The instant gratification of parking documents in My Sites that the user can then extend to project members and teammates (think of them as personal silo-points).
Making the user the master of their own organizational structures is a subtle and persuasive way for ECM holdouts to stop using Outlook in ways it was never meant to be deployed -- namely the de facto document server. In the same way this newfound functionality spares grunts like me from the losing hand of knowledge police when needing to enforce governance standards for informal and in-process work-streams that are meant to happen organically and under the enterprise search radar.
Another hard knock sidestepped by My Sites in 2010 is just how effortlessly its silo-point settings work in an imperfect world of low caliber WIFI, intermittent access, and distributed environments. Getting kicked through the firewall is no longer a one-way ticket to a final draft of an open-ended version. The flexibility of Workspace 2010 (formerly Groove) insures that the collaboration is not beholden to connectivity. This is a sensible way for independent contributors to perform away from the network.
Self-policing means that ECM managers could spend less time in the regulatory stacks, inventorying file shares and focus more on the opportunity side of their businesses. In my case this means accelerating the speed of IP creation, propagation, and absorption by a captive, restless, and even grateful group of colleagues.
You know how tired you are of hearing how public Google has it over private search? Well, they're equally bored with repeating it. Making My Sites your restricted access hub means more attention for taxonomical builds and metadata catalogs -- the ECM investments worth making.
That's when we can logoff with our users' assurance that "I don't need you to worry for me cause I'm alright." Go ahead with your own MySites and tell us your story.
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