Actually, maybe the title is a bit misleading. This should actually be called "Your First 30 Days Before SharePoint". In this posting I'll concentrate on the steps for establishing a SharePoint strategy and preparing your project team for a SharePoint pilot.
Let's set the premise...
Your organization has decided on SharePoint 2007 (or 2010). They want to roll out a new portal. They've chartered you with leading the project. Now what?
Well, there's two ways to go about it. Hire a consultant or bring the project in-house. This blog won't make a case for either, just help you understand what needs to be accomplished before your SharePoint site goes live.
To make this simple, I'll break this into 4 weeks. Of course depending on the size of your organization your time line could expand or contract.
Week 1
Put Away Your SharePoint DVDs and Licenses
No need to install anything yet. Don't experiment "and let SharePoint grow organically" or make other well meaning, but foolish choices. Setting up a SharePoint Portal and starting to add documents is like moving into a house. Once you do, it's going to be a lot harder to go back and paint, fix the creaky floors, and do other things to make your stay pleasant. We'll be talking about the steps you'll take to do this planning upfront.
Pick Your Project Steering Committee
You're going to need a cross section of users to give input and represent different departments and users. You want to pick people who are excited enough to participate during the design process. These will be your allies later when it's time to roll this out to your company.
Define and Inventory Existing Content
Is there lots of content on a shared network drive? Do you have an existing document management system you are going to retire? Are documents being stored on everyone's laptops? You'll want to start getting a handle on exactly how much content is out there and how big the footprint may be. Don't worry yet about deciding what to bring into SharePoint at this point, just know what's out there and how much.
Week 2
Map Out Your Portal
Don't start throwing up those department sites yet. Again, don't install anything. Work with your project steering committee. Start to draw out a rough map of how your portal might lay out. This is going to be your visual guide during all your meetings and discussions. It will be the visual model as you talk about your SharePoint portal. We recommend using some type of Mind Map software.
Back to the map… how should it look? During this step you're trying to establish how you'll group the pages in your portal into sites. In most cases it will mimic your organizational structure with a few extensions or enhancements. Right now you're trying to establish the sites in your SharePoint site collection or the "tabs" that you see on the top row of your navigation.
Don't worry if you're struggling to define how your map will look, your map will continue to evolve as you collaborate on future steps.
Pick a Pilot Site
Even if you have some experience with content and document management, it won't hurt to start with one department or site as a proof of concept for your content management strategy. Not sure what to choose? IT or HR is usually the best bet. Both these can establish a solid proof of concept and help your project steering committee. After you've decided on your pilot site, define any content that should be migrated to your pilot site.
Week 3
Decide on Your Content Types
I won't dive into taxonomy and classification theory, but basically you'll need to decide how you to sort your documents into groups. Do this for all the sites, not just the pilot site. This exercise will help you start to get a handle on your document management strategy.
Groups of documents usually include things like resumes, invoices, proposals, white papers, project plans, power point presentations, etc. You're going to leverage these content types in your search later, so be thinking of the groups of documents you'd like to sort by before you start searching for something.
For example, if you're thinking "I'd like to quickly find all the invoices for client X." An invoice would be a good candidate for a content type.
Decide on Your Meta Data and Site Columns
So you've defined a list of content types. Decide what types of information or tags you'd logically search by if you wanted to find these. Getting back to the invoice example, besides a client name, is there a project number that would help you locate the correct invoice? These are all examples of the data that you will associate with the different content types and use to "tag" and later find your documents.
SharePoint uses site columns to help keep these tags consistent across a site collection. Want the tag for "client name" to mean the same thing (and maybe offer the same choices in a drop down) across the entire site collection? Add it to your site column list. Now associate your site columns with your list of content types.
Is There Data Sources for Your Site Columns?
Already entering company data into a custom application, CRM or ERP system? Consider populating your site columns directly from these sources which will then feed this data into your content types. For example, if you're already keeping all your client names and projects in Salesforce.com, consider "feeding" these to the SharePoint site columns. This will take some integration work, but help to keep your data clean and automate maintenance. We recommend trying to use these data sources during your pilot project to help you better understand the scope of this integration work and trouble-shoot any issues in a more controlled environment.
Week 4
Update and Add Details to Your Mind Map
Update your map with document libraries and content types. You should be able to start matching content types to your sites and sub sites. For example if you have a content type called "resumes", you can note this on the HR site of your map. This exercise may also trigger some ideas for new content types you may have missed. Next add document libraries to the sites and sub sites in your Mind Map and decide how content types should be matched with these document libraries.
You'll also be ready to start thinking about security. When possible, we recommend a very "open" security strategy letting people access documents and data across the entire site collection. The idea is to let people use effort and knowledge from other users of the site. Only "lock-out" users from different sites if this is absolutely necessary. This will also cut down on a lot of extra support in the future as well. If you do have documents or data in a site that you would like to restrict access to, consider storing these in an additional document library in the site or sub site. Identify and note any sites, sub sites or document libraries you would like to restrict access to on your mind map. If you're doing the project in-house, we'd recommend using the restricted document library concept in your pilot site to better understand how security works with SharePoint.
Define Your SharePoint Security Groups for Your Pilot
Decide how your organization should control access to the documents and content on your pilot site. What are the different security groups? Which of these groups can read, edit, or delete documents? Are there groups that should be restricted from the site or specific content? Define this up front before you start to build your pilot.
Define Content for Your Landing Page
To build a foundation for your portal that can expand after the pilot site stage, we recommend planning for a landing page for the portal and adding your pilot site as a site or sub site consistent with how it's defined in your mind map. Even if your landing page will just say "Welcome to the Portal", you should consider following this strategy since it helps establish your navigation and security for moving forward.
You're Ready for Your SharePoint Pilot
You've now established a solid starting point for your SharePoint document management strategy that may help you avoid some major headaches in the future. You're ready to install SharePoint, roll out a pilot and adjust your strategy based on what you learn. After your pilot, you will be able to go through similar planning steps for rolling out a portal for your entire organization.