Along with several colleagues, today I attended part one of Bob Mixon's six-part webinar series on challenges related to findability in SharePoint environments. Today's findability focus was that tools and technology alone is not the answer, and addressed the notion that user actions –and user expectations– play a large role in the relative success of an intranet's findability.
Mixon defines findability as "the art and science of making information available to users," noting emphatically that this means "it's not just search." In addition to search, the key components of findability were identified as being: governance, architecture, design, and navigation. Mixon noted that most users tend to search on the internet, but resort to browsing (i.e., point and click) on intranets. Once thousands of sites/documents exist within an intranet, however, search becomes essential in that environment as well.
At one hour in duration, Mixon's live presentation over his shared PowerPoint slides was both crisp and effective. So as to address in-session questions, Mixon's business partner Jeff Dalton manned the handy live chat module pictured at left. In response to one such question regarding the logistical challenges regarding providing end user training within large organizations, Dalton replied with some exciting news. It turns out that Mixon Consulting are working in partnership with Mark Miller at EndUserSharePoint to create a virtual training facility for end users, and they are anticipating September launch for the area. Well played, gentlemen!
As well, an in-session online poll regarding the relative success of search implementation within the organizations of attendees provided another clean method of interaction with –and feedback from– the audience without interrupting the flow of the presentation.
For information on registering for the remainder of the (free) series, please see Mixon's guest appearance in the Bamboo Team Blog. If you missed today's kickoff, you can get up to speed with the PowerPoint portion of the presentation via this Media page on the Mixon Consulting site.
Posted
Jul 31 2008, 05:26 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.