Notes: Information Architecture & Planning for SharePoint
Here
are my notes and resource collection on Information Architecture for
SharePoint, its a task in progress, I will keep adding more on this topic
here...
Information
architecture determines how the information in that site or solution—its
webpages, documents, lists, and data—is organized and presented to the site’s
users. Information architecture is often recorded as a hierarchical list of
content, search keywords, data types, and other concepts.
Assess your
organization’s information architecture to make it as efficient as possible: A
comprehensive assessment of your organization's information architecture can
help you identify efficiencies, such as the following:
Ways to
be efficient
|
|
 |
Use metadata to make it easier to search for and compare related data or content. |
 |
Manage versions and records to ensure that you can tell which is the authoritative version of a document |
 |
Catalog and store information properly so decision-makers can find and rely on the right data. |
| Design navigation and present information so that users can find important sites and information. | |
| Integrate your information architecture with your environment's search strategy, so your users can find the right information. Information architecture includes the wireframe and site map, search and navigation, managed metadata tags, and content types. | |
 |
Define a publishing strategy: distribute authoring tasks and use cross-site publishing to control the design of the site and display of the content. |
Good
information architecture supports the following goals:
· Manageable Can the IT team effectively implement and manage
the information?
· Meets requirements Does the information architecture meet
regulatory requirements, privacy needs, and security goals?
· Increases business effectiveness Does
the architecture add to your organization’s effectiveness?
Questions to
ask when you design a site or solution:
Information access
Be sure to
consider access to content when you design your solution and sites. This
overlaps with IT governance as you consider your entire environment. Ask these
questions:
Information management: permissions and audiences
Question
|
More
information
|
| How do I structure permission in a site? | Overview of site permissions in SharePoint 2013 |
| How do I target content to a specific audience? | Audience and content targeting planning (SharePoint Server 2010) |
| Should I use Information Rights Management (IRM) to protect content? | Plan Information Rights Management (SharePoint Server 2010) |
IT governance: access
Question
|
More
information
|
| How do I make this content available to external users? | SharePoint 2013 design samples: Corporate portal and extranet sites |
| How do I make sure that only people who need access have it? | Security and permissions (SharePoint 2013) |
Information management tools
Govern your
information by using tools for information management, including:
Tool
|
More
information
|
| Use workflows and approvals for Document Centers and site pages—wherever official documentation is stored. | Plan content types and workflows in SharePoint 2013 |
| Use approval for published websites to control pages. | Plan for Internet, intranet, and extranet publishing sites in SharePoint Server 2013 and Plan content types and workflows in SharePoint 2013 |
| Use version history and version control to maintain a history and master document. | Plan document versioning, content approval, and check-out controls in SharePoint 2013 |
| Use content types with auditing and expiration for document libraries to manage document life cycle. | Plan document management in SharePoint 2013 |
| Manage libraries by using the Content Organizer. | Configure the Content Organizer to route documents |
| Use site policies to manage site collection life cycles. | Overview of site policies in SharePoint 2013 |
| Use Information Rights Management and auditing to secure and audit important corporate assets and any sites that contain sensitive information. | Apply Information Rights Management to a list or library and Configure audit settings for a site collection |
Determine the
rules or policies that you need for the following types of items: pages, lists,
documents,
records,
rich assets,
blogs and wikis, feeds,
anonymous comments, anonymous access, terms
and term sets, and external data (Business
Connectivity Services).
As a good
information management practice, consider the balance among the following
factors:
·
Availability Content needs to be available when users need it
and where they can get to it.
·
Access Consider who has access to the content. If it
should be secure, is it?
·
Redundancy Shared copies reduce redundancy and provide one
version of a document.
Consider your
priorities for different content by thinking through questions like these:
·
Which of these factors is the highest priority for each type of
content?
·
Is availability more important than access?
·
Is access more important than redundancy?
·
What would make it so difficult for users that they would be
tempted to use a different solution?
·
What trade-offs are possible or desirable?
Based on the availability of the stakeholders or
team members within the organization for which may need to facilitate
meetings and gather specific information, it is a best practices approach to
first start with a more broad set of questions in these initial sessions.
Initial Questions You Must Ask
What currently exists? The following questions can
assist you with finding your initial IA baseline:
- What content management, content storage systems, or technologies currently exist within the organization?
- Do you need to take into consideration any previous versions of SharePoint that may exists?
- Does your organization have a complex or even massive file share environment in place?
- Is there an existing intranet with documents or static content that will need to be analyzed and considered? If so, who owns or updates this content?
- What does your organization consider to be a record?
- Is there a retention policy or schedule in place from your legal or compliance department?
- Are there environmental considerations such as both a “private cloud” (on-premises) as well as a “public cloud” (hosted Office 365) that may have separate IA requirements or hybrid architecture considerations?
- Are there any globally specific regulations such as those in the European Union (EU)? If so, some social features and components as well as their specific fields may need to be excluded within SharePoint Governance model and vetted by the legal and compliance stakeholders.
Some of these questions can be political landmines
that you may need to carefully step around while also ensuring the right
audiences or stakeholders are included and briefed on the SharePoint effort so
that they have a communication channel into at least part of the decision
making process. Do not bring a blank piece of paper to the meeting and just ask
them, “What do you need and how do you want it?”
Information Architecture Requirements Gathering
Sessions
You must be prepared in every SharePoint
information gathering session with questions, topics, and agenda items that are
relevant to the audience you are interviewing. You must have a solid idea of
your baseline requirements as well as how those baseline requirements play into
the phase or even multiple parallel phases you are addressing while always
keeping the long-term roadmap in mind.
There are also specific regulatory considerations,
laws, and industry specific questions that must be considered because if they
are ignored the organization may be open to litigation or penalties. The
following questions should be asked and considered around any data being stored
within SharePoint:
- What is sensitive information?
- How should you protect it?
- Does your organization use encryption?
- Who is sensitive information classified?
- Does this sensitive information need to be stored in a protected location?
- What compliance is required under privacy regulations?
Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) Information
- SBU information is any information, the loss, misuse, or modification of which, or unauthorized access to, could adversely affect the national interest or the conduct of Federal programs, or the privacy to which individuals are entitled under the Privacy Act, but which has not been specifically authorized under criteria established by an executive order or an act of Congress to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.
PII - Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
- PII is information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual.
- Sensitive PII
- Sensitive PII is a combination of PII elements, which if lost, compromised, or disclosed without authorization could be used to inflict substantial harm, embarrassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to an individual.
Examples of Sensative PII Data
- a social security number by itself, or
- an individual's first name or first initial and last name in combinationwith any one or more types of the following information, including, but not limited to:
- social security number
- passport number
- credit card number
- home telephone number
- personal cell phone number
- clearances
- bank numbers
- date and place of birth
- mother's maiden name
- financial records, etc.
Note: This information may be in the form of paper,
electronic, or any other media format.
- PII is information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual.
Protected Health information (PHI)
PHI is any information about health status,
provision of health care, or payment for health care that can be linked to a
specific individual. Under the US Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA), PHI that is linked based on the following list of
18 identifiers must be treated with special care:
- Names
- Dates (other than year) directly related to an individual
- Phone numbers
- Fax numbers
- Email addresses
- Social Security numbers
- Medical record numbers
- Health insurance beneficiary numbers
- Account numbers
- Certificate/license numbers
- Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers;
- Device identifiers and serial numbers;
- Web Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)
- Internet Protocol (IP) address numbers
- Biometric identifiers, including finger, retinal and voice prints
- Full face photographic images and any comparable images
- Any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code except the unique code assigned by the investigator to code the data
Who are the individuals that will be able to
provide you with insight into what content exists and who may own or access
this content? As the requirements gathering sessions progress you may find that
there are multiple version of documents stored in several locations but ensure
you are working toward an IA design that will provide a “one version of the
truth” principle to eliminate duplicate content that can lead to inaccurate
reporting and metrics.
You may experience team members that are “content
hoarders” in some departments, divisions, or business units that will push back
on your requests and may not provide you exactly what you are wanting in
initial sessions.
These types of issues must be identified,
addressed, and resolved. These individuals must be approached by either a
manager or stakeholder that can provide them with an enforceable directive to
ensure their participation and assistance with the content identification and
clarifications specific to their area of the IA design.
Note: It is very important to keep in mind
that your analysis and efforts around the design of SharePoint 2013’s IA is one
of the more difficult and tedious processes within the overall implementation.
The identification and content analysis effort you are performing is more than
likely a task that has been put off by the organization for many years. If it
was easy, anyone could do it but it is not, and you must remain focused and
consistent in your effort as consistency is key!
Planning For Future Content Growth
There may be questions around content and how it’s
used that may not be able to be answered until a future phase or other external
business decision is made which may cause you and the project team concern.
There is no way to control these issues that are out of your hands and it may
affect the IA.
In these cases you need to follow the most scalable
model that will allow the IA to meet current requirements as well as those on
the future roadmap that you have been able to identify.
Once you have identified the key users and
stakeholders that have the in-depth knowledge of the content in a given area or
department you should also consider that user or stakeholder to be a future
SharePoint Power Users or Content Owner as this will ease the transition over
to the new platform.
It will be very beneficial for you to document
their input carefully and under no circumstances put the content and/or
documents that are required for this user or set of users to do their job in a
“migration” holding pattern or somehow affect the permission and access to the
content.
Note: All business or mission critical content must
be identified and these types of users, the ones who really understand the
content in their department or given “area,” can help you ensure this content
is approached with extreme care and consideration.
- The question of “what is a record” in your organization is typically defined by managers and those organizations that are larger in nature may have a “records manager” or “compliance officer” who can help you make huge strides towards your goals.
- These managers or officers can help you understand what the key underlying records are to the organization. In many organizations, the retention schedule or related “company enterprise content management initiative” may not yet have all of these spelled out in a manner for which you can immediately use but this is where you can start to see how the IA will scale and identify some timelines around when this information can be provided or when it may be available.
How Should Your Information Architecture and
Related Taxonomy be Structured?
The information architecture design and related
analysis you perform will be the driving factor around areas such as site
structure and the services and functionality provided by SharePoint 2013.
Whether your organization’s SharePoint 2013
implementation should be departmentally structured and follow closely to the
company’s organizational chart or should have a functional hierarchy based
around the major functionalities of business units and their related divisions
should be determined once you fully understand the options SharePoint 2013
provides to you and your team.
The Technical Side of the Information Architecture
Design
The technical side of the design of SharePoint’s IA
can be confusing to non-technical project team members or content owners so
it’s important to keep your audience in mind when discussing certain components
and technical terms.
If you walk into a meeting with content owners or a
records manager without SharePoint technical knowledge, you will lose their
attention and interest very quickly if you jump right into a conversation about
site collections and web applications. It is your job to take the “business
speak” and turn it into “technical speak” in defining your requirements.
This “technical business analyst” type approach
will make your discussions with the business much more productive and will
require some preparation prior to the actual meeting(s). Have a defined plan
and approach with questions specific and meaningful to that particular
stakeholder, department, or set of users ready prior to engaging with them.
Understanding SharePoint 2013’s Logical Architecture
To drill-down into the overall logical architecture
of SharePoint 2013, the underlying technical components and features that
factor into the design of SharePoint 2013’s IA are as follows:
- Service Applications
- Application Pools
- Web Applications
- Zone(s)
- Site Collections
- Sites
- Lists & Libraries
SharePoint 2013 allows for individual services to
be configured and controlled at an extremely granular level. These “service
applications” allow for key features and the resources for which they provide
to be shared across a SharePoint farm and throughout sites. The following is a
list of the service application in SharePoint 2013:
- Access Services Web Service Application
- App Management Service Application
- Business Data Connectivity Service Application
- Search Service Application
- Excel Services Application
- Managed Metadata Service
- PerformancePoint Service Application
- PowerPoint Conversion Service Application
- Secure Store Service Application
- Machine Translation Service
- Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application
- User Profile Service Application
- State Service
- Visio Graphics Service Application
- Security Token Service Application
- Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service Application
The image below provides an overview of SharePoint
2013’s service applications as well as how they flow into the overall
information architecture.
Detailed overview showing SharePoint 2013’s
information architecture flow and structure
SharePoint 2013’s Application Pool and Web
Application capabilities, as shown in the image below, have a different
configuration model than those in previous versions of SharePoint. In most
cases there should be one web application and one related zone. You also can
utilize host named site collections that have much improved scaling capabilities
with reduced resource consumption.
If you are new to SharePoint, an application pool
is a construct model used to gather or group web applications in a logical
manner based on your organization specific requirements such as performance
needs and any security or configuration specific elements such as
authentication.
Taking advantage of the host-named site collections
option is recommended as that is the same architecture that Office 365 uses so
planning for any future possible hybrid architecture will reduce the need for
future configuration changes which can be costly and time consuming on both the
IT side of the organization as well as the actual users of SharePoint.
There are always specific requirements that an
organization may have that can cause you to go with a different configuration
model such as the need to enable apps in environments with multiple zones or
those that require mixing host-named site collections and path-based site
collections. The initial recommendation above thou should be followed in most
all cases unless you have specific requirements such as those I just named.
A diagram of SharePoint 2013’s Web Applications
showing an example of a best practices configuration
The following
table presents resources that are available to help information architects plan
the information architecture of your SharePoint Server solution.
Information architecture resources
Saravjeet Lamba
Tags: Information Architecture | SharePoint 2013 | SharePoint 2010 | SharePoint IA | Planning | Design
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