Card sorting is a technique that many information architects (and related professionals.) use as an input to the structure of a site or product. With so many of us using the technique, why would we need to write an article on it?

While card sorting is described in a few texts and a number of sites, most descriptions are brief. There is not a definitive article that describes the technique and its variants and explains the issues to watch out for. Given the number of questions posted to discussion groups, and discussions we have had at conferences, we thought it was time to get all of the issues in one place.

This article provides a detailed description of the basic technique, with some focus on using the technique for more complex sites. This article does not cover some issues such as the use of online tools, which will be covered in a future article.

Read more…….

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

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Records Management:

- Management of the record is more important than the content of the record

- The record never changes (although its properties might)

- Records require access controls, lots of them

Document Management/Collaboration:

- Without content there is no document

- The document changes a lot, that’s the whole point of collaboration

- Access controls restrict and impede collaboration, the fewer there are the better

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1. Companies spend $20 in labour to file a document, $120 in labour to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labour to reproduce a lost document.

2. 7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.

3. Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.

4. The average document photocopied 19 times.

5. There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).

6. Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.

7. Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).

8. A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.

9. The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.

10. The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).

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PDF

An advantage of the PDF file format is that anyone can view the document using Adobe Acrobat® Reader, which is free software that can be downloaded from the Internet. This feature makes it very easy to share documents within or outside of an organization because everyone can view the document at no additional cost.

The PDF file format has become the de facto file format for the Internet. This is due to its small file size and the ability to begin viewing the document as soon as the first page downloads (other file formats require you to download the entire file before you can begin viewing the document).

A significant advantage of the PDF file format is that you can add document security at document level. Using Adobe Acrobat® and other third party plug-ins allows you to add file security to prevent unauthorized viewing of the document.

In addition, you cannot alter a PDF document without leaving an electronic footprint. This is a major reason why the U.S. Federal Judiciary has mandated its use for electronic filing of case documents. It also gives an organization the freedom to keep the scanned PDF images on a server to be shared throughout the organization, without the fear of document manipulation.

TIFF

Many document imaging companies that use the TIFF file format use proprietary software to view the TIFF images because the TIFF file format can utilize a variety of compression ratios. This can create a problem for your organization if you were to migrate your imaging system to a different vendor in the future. Your new vendor must have the ability to open and view your archived TIFF documents, which is frequently impossible.

Because of the requirement for proprietary viewing software, it may be difficult to share TIFF files with people outside of your organization. It is important to find out the cost of providing viewing software to outside parties that will be accessing and viewing your documents.

Since a TIFF image can be altered without leaving an electronic footprint, it will require you to save the document to an optical disk or a WORM drive as a read-only file. These devices restrict the ability to alter the document.

You can easily annotate TIFF files where as you can’t with PDF files without 3rd party tools.

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Here are 5 tips Bob English gave about document management in Sharepoint at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference. Bob English is founder over at Mindsharp.

* Most important, English said, is to define a document’s lifecycle. This includes determining where a document will be incubated, what metadata will be in the document, who owns the document and when it should expire, among a number of other important details — all throughout its lifecycle.

* Be cautious of how you bestow access permissions to individual site administrators. Not every site administrator should be privy to all corporate information. With that in mind, when there is a different relationship between a document’s security, security nodes and site collection ownership, you need a different site collection. A site collection is a group of sites built on SharePoint that exist under a top-level site. Individuals have permission rights for sites and content within a site collection. “There are still people out there who think you need only one site collection, but it’s not true,” English said.

* Match the findability architecture with the metadata that is applied to the document. If people are going to find a document using the Advanced Search Web Part tool, the document’s metadata needs to be exposed to that tool. If you know that a document is in a particular department, with a particular security clearance and the author’s name and the topic, it’s more easily found in the Advanced Search Web Part than in simple search. But other methods of finding the document are helpful too. Pairing up how a document is described with the findability tools is imperative to helping achieve a fully functioning collaboration system.

* Make sure IT managers set the document library security settings before the document is put into the library. Some document library security settings are applied to the document when it is created and uploaded. The settings can’t be changed on documents that exist in the library. “Understand and know what security settings you want in your library settings,” he said.

Source: http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid1_gci1332665,00.html

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Uploading bulk files into Sharepoint can be a nightmare when file names contain illegal / reserved characters. A useful utility called Name Munger can assist you in renaming all your files quickly & easily so that they are Sharepoint compliant.

Name Munger (pronounced “Name Munjer”) is a powerful, yet simple-to-use batch file renaming utility. Simply drag one or more files or folders onto the Name Munger icon and you can easily add text before or after the existing name, change one or more occurrences of part of the name or even remove some of the name. In a snap you can rename dozens or even hundreds of files.

Name Munger Features

Quickly rename one file or a thousand with a simple drag-n-drop!
Add to the beginning of file and folder names.
Add to the end of file and folder names.
Replace text anywhere in a file or folder name.
Remove text from anywhere in a file or folder name.
Strip any character or set of characters from file or folder names.
Strip leading and/or trailing spaces from a file or folder name.
Change file names to ALL UPPER CASE, all lower case, Title Caps, or Initial caps.
Add customizable numbers before, after or instead of file or folder names.
Renames items in nested folders or just those you select.
Preview your changes before applying them.

Bulk File Renaming Utility

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A recent study conducted by ioko for a typical NHS Trust indicated that over half the respondents found it difficult to find information and could not be sure they were using the latest version of the document. 32% indicated that they spent between 2 to 5 hours or more per week searching for information.

You do the maths !!

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No more fumbling with My Computer or Windows Explorer, wishing you could print information about all your files. Karen’s Directory Printer can print the name of every file on a drive, along with the file’s size, date and time of last modification, and attributes (Read-Only, Hidden, System and Archive)! And now, the list of files can be sorted by name, size, date created, date last modified, or date of last access.

Directory Printer

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REMEMBER:

You can restrict number of versions in following ways:
1) You can limit the number of major versions
2) You can limit a number of major version that will have minor versions
3) You CANNOT limit a number of minor versions to keep for a major version

When you reach your version limits the oldest version will be deleted. Remember these are deleted permanently, they are NOT sent to the recycle bin!

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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes features that can help you control access to content. You configure settings for the content control features discussed in this article in document libraries. To share these settings across libraries in your solution, you can create document library templates that include your content control settings; this ensures that new libraries will reflect your content control decisions.

Plan versioning

Versioning is the method by which successive iterations of a document are numbered and saved. Office SharePoint Server 2007 has three versioning options:

None Specifies that no previous versions of documents are saved. When no versioning is in use, previous versions of documents are not retrievable, and document history is also lost because comments that accompany each iteration of a document are not saved. Use this option on document libraries containing unimportant content or content that will never change.

Major versions only Specifies that numbered versions of documents are retained using a simple versioning scheme (such as 1, 2, 3). To control the effect on storage space, you can specify how many previous versions to keep, counting back from the current version.

In major versioning, each time a new version of a document is saved, all users with permissions to the document library will be able to view the content. Use this option when you do not want to differentiate between draft versions of documents and published versions. For example, in a document library that is used by a workgroup in an organization, major versioning is a good choice if everyone on the team needs to be able to view all iterations of each document.

Major and minor versions Specifies that numbered versions of documents are retained by using a major and minor versioning scheme (such as 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1). Versions ending with .0 are major versions and versions ending with non-zero extensions are minor versions. Previous major and minor versions of documents are saved along with current versions. To control the effect on storage space, you can specify how many previous major versions to keep, counting back from the current version. You can also specify for how many major versions minor versions should be kept. For example, if you specify that minor versions should be kept for two major versions and the current major version is 4.0, then all minor versions starting at 3.1 will be kept.

In major and minor versioning, any user with read permissions can view major versions of documents. You can specify which users can view minor versions. Typically, grant users who can edit items permissions to view and work with minor versions, and restrict users with read permissions to viewing only major versions.

Use major and minor versioning when you want to differentiate between published content that can be viewed by an audience and draft content that is not yet ready for publication. For example, on a human resources Web site that describes organizational benefits, use major and minor versioning to restrict employees’ access to benefits descriptions while the descriptions are being revised.

Plan content approval

Content approval is the method by which site members with approver permissions control the publication of content. A document draft awaiting content approval is in the Pending state. When an approver reviews the document and approves the content, it becomes available for viewing by site users with read permissions. A document library owner can enable content approval for a document library and can optionally associate a workflow with the library to run the approval process.

Use content approval to formalize and control the process of making content available to an audience. For example, an enterprise that publishes content as one of its products or services might require a legal review and approval before publishing the content.

The way that documents are submitted for approval varies depending on the versioning settings in the document library:

None If no versioning is in use and changes to a document are saved, the document’s state becomes Pending. Office SharePoint Server 2007 keeps the previous version of the document so users with read permissions can still view it. After the pending changes have been approved, the new version of the document is made available for viewing by users with read permissions and the previous version is discarded.

If no versioning is in use and a new document is uploaded to the document library, it is added to the library in the Pending state and is not viewable by users with read permissions until it is approved.

Major versions only If major versioning is in use and changes to a document are saved, the document’s state becomes Pending and the previous major version of the document is made available for viewing by users with read permissions. After the changes to the document are approved, a new major version of the document is created and made available to site users with read permissions, and the previous version is saved to the document’s history list.

If major versioning is in use and a new document is uploaded to the document library, it is added to the library in the Pending state and is not viewable by users with read permissions until it is approved as version 1.

Major and minor versions If major and minor versioning is in use and changes to a document are saved, the author has the choice of saving a new minor version of the document as a draft or creating a new major version, which changes the document’s state to Pending. After the changes to the document are approved, a new major version of the document is created and made available to site users with read permissions. In major and minor versioning, both major and minor versions of documents are kept in a document’s history list.

If major and minor versioning is in use and a new document is uploaded to the document library, it can be added to the library in the Draft state as version 0.1, or the author can immediately request approval in which case the document’s state becomes Pending.

Plan check-in and check-out

You can require that users check documents in and out of a document library before editing the documents. It is always recommended to do this. The benefits of requiring checking in and out include:

Better control of when document versions are created. When a document is checked out, the author can save the document without checking it in. Other users of the document library will not be able to see these changes and a new version is not created. A new version (visible to other users) is only created when an author checks in a document. This gives the author more flexibility and control.

Better capture of metadata. When a document is checked in, the author can write comments that describe the changes made to the document. This promotes creation of an ongoing historical record of the changes made to the document.

If your solution requires that users check documents in and out when editing them, the 2007 Microsoft Office system client programs include features that support these actions. Users can check documents out, undo check-outs, and check documents in from 2007 Office system client programs.

When a document is checked out, it is saved in the user’s My Documents folder in a subfolder named “SharePoint Drafts.” This folder is displayed in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. As long as the document is checked out, the user can only save edits to this local folder. When the user is ready to check the document in, the document is saved back to the original server location.

From 2007 Office system client programs, users can optionally choose to leave checked-out documents on the server by changing content editing options.

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After you identify your content stakeholders, collect information from them that will help you analyze how documents are used in your organization. This is an important part of the planning process because the analysis helps you determine:

How document libraries are structured.

Which site templates to use.

How many sites you will need.

Which information management policies to apply to the sites.

Which physical server topology you will need to implement your solution.

The information to collect includes:

Document type, such as equity research note, employee performance review, internal memo, or product specification.

Purpose of each document type, such as “provides customers with recommendations about equities along with supporting data.”

Author of each document type (listed as roles, not individuals, such as “Financial Analyst,” “Human Resources Specialist,” or “Product Manager”).

Format of the document. If the document is transformed from one format to another, record that information.

Users of each document type, such as “customers” or “team members.”

Other roles that apply to the document’s life cycle, such as “technical reviewer” or “copy editor.”

Location of the document, such as “client computer,” “Web server,” or “file server.” Note that this question could have multiple answers, such as when a document is authored on a client computer and then published to a Web server.

How readers view the document, such as from a Web page or a file share.

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