The free Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) are widely used to simplify the collaboration between teams that are working together with office applications using the internet. In order to collaborate effectively, people have to communicate effectively. For this a shared understanding of the company's terms and of the relationships between this terms is required – taxonomies and ontologies.
Why taxonomies?
A taxonomy is a system of definitions that are used to describe, categorize, recognize, organize and manage information, to show how they interrelate. Hierarchical relationships (e.g. ‘parent-child’) and associative relationships (e.g. ‘see also’) capture the essence of a subject area by being described by a taxonomy. A taxonomy enables documents or other items to be classified and organized according to a category structure. It therefore enables users to access this documents more easily and also guides them in exploring a document collection by laying out the conceptual structure of the subject area and enhancing knowledge discovery. By far the most effective method of finding information is browsing a structured classification system. Thus a taxonomy makes it possible to describe
- the structure of products and solutions a company offers,
- the company’s organizational structure,
- typical process tasks or life situations (e.g. my first day in the company, all documents about companys security policy)
- time-based cross-list cross-site informations (e.g. infos that are new or changed in last month within one category)
- geographical, language or subsidary-based information
- Information for defined target groups like sales, development, students etc.
Additionally related information is displayed, e.g.
- responsible sales and technical contact for a product,
- related product sheets, available service documents,
- associated events, training days or
- connected tasks.
Scattered documents among isolated sites
From this point of view SharePoint data often is difficult to manage, especially when the documents are scattered among different isolated pages or sites. The SharePoint navigation is based on a single hierarchical folder structure which only allows content to be classified with a single term. This causes problems when content logically relates to more than a single term and terms at different levels within a hierarchy. Navigation is difficult, often impossible. Frequently required information is totally inaccessible both for users and services (e.g. machines). Metadata, e.g. from Office Documents, is saved, but not managed. In some areas, e.g. within the Public Sector, adherence to the use of predefined taxonomies to classify content is a mandatory compliance issue.
If the user has to rely on searching alone, then all the effort in locating information is down to them, and they often do not know the contents of the possibly existing repositories. Structuring the information in advance as a mandatory part of the default content creation process assists the user before they even start spending their time on search.
With the fast growing amount of collaboration data, the need for additional features to organize, classify, categorize, access and manage this information items has never been greater.
The SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint enables users to have different category-based views to their cross-site items, independend from its location. These views can be timebased (e.g. all new items in this category from last week), by author or by any other criteria. All usual view-based features are provided, including subscription by RSS and e-mail alerts.
With that extension the information inside a SharePoint portal can be transformed to knowledge and the portal becomes a place to share knowledge as well as content.