This is the third post in a series (1, 2, 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 the second post we focused on how Office 365 and SharePoint can play a part in moving to the cloud.  Here we cover how they can help join up your organisation online using their collaboration tools and features.

When arranging the habitat, it is key to address the theme of collaboration. Since each of these themes, derives different feature settings of artifacts and services. In many cases, teamwork is situated in the context of a project. Other themes for collaboration are the line of business unit teamwork, or the more learning networks a.k.a communities of practice. I will leave these later themes for now.

Most enterprises have some project management process (i.e. PMP) that all projects do have to adhere to, with added complementary documentation, and reporting mechanisms. This is so the leadership within the organisation will be able to align resources, govern the change portfolio across different business units. Given this structure, it is very easy to depict measurable outcomes, as project documents have to be produced, regardless of what the project is supposed to contribute towards.

The construction of a habitat, or design of a joint workplace, all boils down to pragmatic steps that are aligned with the overarching project framework at hand. Answering a few simple Questions (Inverted Pyramid):

• Who? will be participating, who will own (organisation) the outcome from the joint effort pulling together a project (dc.contributor ; dc.creator ; dc.provenance ) and reach ( dc.coverage ; dc.audience )
• What? is the project all about, topic and theme (dc.subject ; dc.title ; dc.description, dc.type )
• When? will this project be running, and timeline for ending the project. All temporal themes around the life of a project. (dc.date)
• Where? will participants contribute. What goes where and why? (dc.source ; dc.format ; dc.identifier )
• Why? usually defined in project description, setting common ground for the goals and expected outcome. ( dc.description )
• How? defines used processes, practices and tools to create the expected outcome for the project, with links to common resources as the PMP framework, but also links to other key data-sets. Like ERP record keeping and masterdata, for project number and other measures not stored in the habitat, but still pillars to align to the overarching model. (dc.relation)

When these questions have been answered, the resource description for the habitat is set. In Sharepoint the properties bag (code) feature. During the lifespan of the on-going project, all contribution, conversations and creation of things can inherit rule-based metadata for the artifacts from the collections resource description. This reduces the burden weighing on the actors building the content, by enabling automagic metadata completion where applicable. And from the wayfinding, and findability within and between habitats, these resource descriptions will be the building blocks for a sustainable information architecture.

In our next post we will cover how to encourage employee engagement with your content.

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