It hit me as I was exploring the new features of SharePoint and Office 2010. With the next release of these two products, individuals will have a bewildering array of options for personal and team productivity. How do we help them choose among a personal Web site, Web database, electronic notebook, blog, or wiki? What guidelines should we offer to knowledge workers to increase their productivity in capturing, storing, commenting, tagging, and sharing?

The simplest approach is to standardize on a limited toolset for everyone, but that probably won't work in knowledge-intensive organizations with a large number of professional employees. In this article, I'll review some new features in SharePoint and Office 2010, discuss how they might be used for typical knowledge worker tasks, suggest things to consider when creating selection and usage guidelines, and share some thoughts on how I plan to use them.

Managing people information
I wrote "People issues are key to Internet ROI" in 1998 to redress the neglect of the human element in Internet projects. Today, it's much easier for individuals to create networks of colleagues, annotate content, and share their expertise.

Still, managing documents is easier than managing people information. First, print and database publishing provide models that we can adapt to managing electronic content. Second, there's a lot of variation in the way people gather, create, and use information. So, how do we create guidelines that serve the enterprise need for consistency and at the same time are sufficiently flexible to increase knowledge worker productivity?

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Created on February 25, 2010 l Updated on February 26, 2010