Taxonomies (hierarchical topic lists) work reasonably well for e-commerce and public Web sites because the audience is well defined and the content highly vetted. But for unofficial information of the sort stored in SharePoint lists and libraries, taxonomies are less effective. Often they are only a band aid that masks a more serious underlying disease — the lack of a functional knowledge ecology. In this article, we look at:

• why unofficial corporate content is hard to find;
• what is needed to make unofficial information findable;
• where to look for suitable publishing models;
• how to adapt commercial publishing models to unofficial information on intranets.

Unofficial information: the corporate content orphan
In most organizations, unofficial information — content that is not used for legal or marketing purposes — is poorly managed, yet it is often a critical factor in performance. In knowledge-intensive firms, sales are not closed or new products created based on marketing brochures, corporate records, or government filings. Instead, revenues are affected by highly detailed, current, and cross functional information that can be stored anywhere — on someone's laptop, in a shared folder on a network computer, or in someone's head.

Taxonomies work well for official content for two reasons:

1. The audiences are few and well defined.

2. The content has been vetted through a formal publication process that includes editorial review, executive approval, fact checking and copy editing, metadata tagging, and regular updating.

For official content, taxonomies serve as a table of contents for highly selective content targeted to a specific audience. They are less effective for unofficial content because the content is of uncertain quality, and there are many possible audiences.

The migration mess
Improving access to unofficial content is a major selling point for an integrated development platform like SharePoint. But merely moving file shares into SharePoint libraries does not automatically make them more findable.

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