This article was inspired by questions asked by Society members in courses and roundtables on Sharepoint and other collaboration systems. With these systems, teams and individuals can improve their productivity by creating an environment tailored to their workflow and closely integrated with other desktop tools. However, as team sites proliferate, enterprise information managers are wondering how to:

• consolidate searching of team sites and other content so the user needs only one search box;

• leverage existing thesauri and controlled vocabularies to help editors create new team sites;

• add features such as glossaries and A - Z topic indexes;

• synchronize enterprise standard terms and categories across all departments and team sites.

Members are using three strategies to meet these challenges:

1. Customize the dominant search engine (e.g. Google or Ultraseek) so that it scans not only intranet content but also team site content.

2. Store metadata in a centralized repository and use custom software modules to display it on team sites.

3. Use specialized metadata management programs that synchronize enterprise standard metadata with team site metadata.

In this article we explore these strategies in more depth using examples from Sharepoint, one of the leading collaboration systems.

Consolidating search
Users of collaboration systems such as Sharepoint need to be able to find items on their own team's site, on another Sharepoint site, or in another content collection outside the Sharepoint universe. Ideally, these three kinds of search would all work the same way. In other words, if the enterprise search allows phrases in quotes, suggests synonyms, and highlights the search term in the results, then they all should (see below).

More ... (members only). How to become a member.

Created on June 6, 2006 l Updated on November 3, 2006