This is the second post in a series (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) on the challenges organisations face as they move from having online content and tools hosted firmly on their estate to renting space in the cloud.  We will help you to consider the options and guide on the steps you need to take.

In the first post we set out the most common challenges you are likely to face and how you may overcome these.  In this post we focus on how Office 365 and SharePoint online can play a part in moving to the cloud.

Let us be pragmatic and down-to-earth! It is time to roll up our sleeves and consider using Office 365, as one example of how organisations can make this transition from their estate to the cloud.  Given that this is the collaborative space many organisations consider using, Office 365 is compelling as a one-size-fits-all, instant build and just roll-out enterprise-wide approach to take sometimes  without an Information Architecture plan whatsoever!

In the Office 365 environment, one has to map the terrain, so that there are distinct districts to where things relate – the same goes for the structure of neighborhoods of clustered habitats. But where it gets tough is to have an agile and resilient city plan for the real-world experience. This is actually the pillar construction in a digital domain, aiming for resilience and emerging uses over the time… but with a simple and agreed upon game plan.

Pace-layering the information architecture

Most organisations have an ontology of entities, things, that are generic, as stated in the W3C Organisation schema. And these perspectives, domain models, vocabularies and ontologies, add up to become districts, and neighborhoods in the Information Architecture map, with a few angles:

1. Organisation Units (Business Unit, Division, Function, Group)
   1. Clients/Customers/Partners/Competitors
   2. Professional Networks
   3. Governing agencies, or regulatory entities, intermediaries
2. Locations (Sites, Geographical places as  /world/continent/country/region/city/address …)
3. Business Processes (Process & Activities)
4. Professions, and Disciplines ( Roles), Practices
5. Topics (derived from line of Business, and controlled vocabularies)
   1. Products
   2. Services
   3. Tasks
6. Temporal (Events)

Regardless of line of Business for an organisation, these pan out as pretty good structural elements on which to build upon. Since an enterprise is a social construct with agreed borders, it is populated with people who act and interplay in various different ways, and have a multitude facets with regards to everyday work. Some entities change more frequently, generally in the organisational units further down in the leaves, and less so in the top main branches. The vocabularies within an organisation needs to be the center pillar, to reduce linguistic insecurities.

From an Information Architecture perspective, in using Office 365 or Sharepoint it is wise to use pace-layering to the building blocks, on to which navigational constructs are built upon. This means, using the highest level of the organisational unit tree branch, a pretty stable foundation for the site-structure can be built. This is where content and teamsites live. More fluid navigational themes (temporal, or topic entities) can then be added.

This goes for activities undertaken within daily practices, where a set of professions and disciplines interact. All of these activities lay out a tapestry of overarching business processes. The outcome or result, might be a thing that is detailed as topic taxonomies. For example, a product structure for a specific manufacturing industry. Since all organisations have actor networks in their ecology, it is preferable to add these entities into the structure, as clients, partners, competitor, regulatory agencies, social networks, communities of practice and so forth.

All of these set of terms, have to be maintained in a Managed Metadata Service, a.k.a TermStore. In most organisations there are other sources of their controlled vocabularies, hence mapping is key, to have aligned master term sets. Either through subscription models (batch) or enterprise-linked-data sets. All these actions, defines the terrain, so we map the ecosystem as taxonomic chartographers.

The Building Blocks: Artifacts and Collections

Office 365 comes with a pretty organised set of tools, themes and things to build upon. For more website related things, one could either use published web sites / portals, or enterprise wikis. The other main services are digital habitats, or collaborative spaces, team-sites. And lasty there are ESN (Enterprise Social Networks) like Yammer, and instant messaging tools like Lync, and Exchange Services like mail and calendar. Sharepoint Online and Office 365 is a Swiss Army Knife.

Within a collection, there are some key artifacts and services, content types:

• documents
• pages, web or wiki
• calendars
• to-do lists
• blogs
• forums
• list object
• and social objects to name a few.

If all of these included content types adhere to Dublin Core with a bare minimum of properties, the rest will follow just great.

We will cover more about how Office 365 and SharePoint collaboration tools can help join up your organisation online in our next post.

Please join our Live Stream on YouTube the 20th November 8.30AM – 10AM Central European Time
Fredric Landqvist research blog
Mark Morell intranet-pioneer