1. Have a strategy.
Use your company's hierarchical classification of its terms of interest as the basis of your tagging system. Work with a professional electronic content information management firm to help you establish your organization's tagging protocols. It's much more effective and cost-efficient to set up tagging protocols right the first time.
Bonus tip: create tags that also use terms used by people within your organization. This returns better, more relevant search results in a shorter period of time.
2. Stop manual tagging of data.
It's rare when two people agree on the same metadata for the same digital asset.
In addition, most manual tagging systems have no provisions to ensure tagging is even happening.
Inconsistent tagging is the number one issue to organizing data within SharePoint.
3. Use automated classification and metadata tagging.
Not only does this ensure actually tagging of data occurs, it uses your corporate taxonomies as the basis of applying tags. This brings consistency and uniformity to your information classification efforts, saving you time and money. There are many methods of automated classification and tagging of data applicable to SharePoint.
4. Let automatically generated metadata drive SharePoint content type.
Your organization should be able to automatically process all digital assets in accordance with its information management, records management and data privacy and security standards. You can automatically update SharePoint Content Types based upon how you define metadata. This saves you time and money in a variety of ways and is something we encourage incorporating into your information management efforts.
5. Use SharePoint to drive records management.
You can automatically apply corporate Records Retention Schedules to all digital assets within SharePoint - an overlooked feature by most users. This automated method to comply with corporate governance policies, as well as legal requirements, is a feature you shouldn't miss out on.
6. Train system users.
It's important to train users how to properly access and use information. With automatic metadata tagging and the appropriate security, companies should be transparent with their data to users. Allow the use of RSS feeds to deliver digital assets to authorized users in addition to desktop options. The better your staff understand your information management system, the more productive your organization.
by Juan Celaya
