SharePoint Products and Technologies provides a robust set of components to implement ECM in a company. In addition to the individual best practices that have already been covered in the previous section, there are some overall best practices that should be observed. In this section, we will examine some of the best practices that apply to the general governance of SharePoint Products and Technologies.
Most traditional ECM deployments concentrate on centralized management. Although this can lead to a quick return on investment, it is rarely a recipe for widespread end-user acceptance and use. One of the strengths of SharePoint Products and Technologies is that you can use a combination of centralized, regionalized, and local governance. This combination of governance can lead to an optimum balance of users feeling in control while still allowing you to maintain an overall corporate look and feel. Balancing these two outcomes will lead to an effective ECM system that will be used consistently for storage of your unstructured and structured content. That balance is the best way to guarantee a successful ECM deployment.
But which components of SharePoint Products and Technologies should be controlled centrally, regionally, or locally? Although each specific deployment will vary, there are some general guidelines that we can provide. Some SharePoint Products and Technologies components such as master pages, layout pages, Web parts, content types, Records Center, taxonomy, and permission level definition, are best controlled centrally, where they can provide a consistent set of standards and enforce a corporate branding. But other components such as versioning, site creation, check-out/in policies, and personalization of pages with Web parts, is best left to local control. In large enterprises, there may even be a need for a more regionalized set of standards. The key to SharePoint Products and Technologies governance is to balance the need for corporate standards against empowerment of local employees.
One of the keys to managing unstructured content stored in files is to understand what kinds of content you are storing. One of your early goals in planning for an ECM system based on SharePoint Products and Technologies should be to develop specific document plans for each specific type of content that you will be storing in your system. These document plans should include the type of content contained in the document, what type of access is needed to the document, how long the content must be available, and any legal requirements about the content. As you refine the plans, they will become the basis for designing content types, security permission levels, information management policies, and perhaps even the design of a Records Center site.
SharePoint Products and Technologies–based ECM systems are rarely created in a vacuum. Most companies will have legacy content that is currently being stored in some other fashion. It is common to want to include migration of this content into SharePoint Products and Technologies as part of your implementation plan. But legacy content should be evaluated before moving it all into SharePoint. If the content is still being modified regularly, then you should consider moving it into an appropriate location in SharePoint. But if the content is essentially read-only content, it will be much more efficient to add the location of that content as a content source in SharePoint’s search and indexing system. Once the legacy content has been added to the search index, users will be able to find and open the content without the work required to migrate that content into SharePoint.
In addition to the question of where to store legacy content, there is also the question of whether large files (over 500 MB) should be stored in SharePoint Products and Technologies. By default, SharePoint Products and Technologies imposes a 500-MB size limit on the upload of files. Although this limit can be increased, Microsoft warns that it is impractical to try to store individual files of more than 2 GB due to network bandwidth and timeouts. Most unstructured content will be well below the 500-MB size limit. But what if you want to include a library of multimedia presentations? Media files will often exceed the 500-MB limit and can even be larger than the 2-GB limitation. One way to overcome these restrictions is by adding the Link to Document content type to document libraries that need to store this type of large file. This content type inherits from the document content type and allows the storage of regular document metadata while storing a link to an external document rather than the document itself. Because the documents will be retrieved through a Web site, the link must be to a Web site location. But using this content type, you can add content of any size to a SharePoint Products and Technologies document library. Figure 9-17 shows a document link being added to a library containing both the document content type and the Link to Document content type.
Most unstructured content is locked up inside files. Although we can find this content by searching for metadata that was collected and indexed when the file was added to SharePoint Products and Technologies, we’ve already discussed how requiring too much metadata can lead users to look for other ways to store their content. One way to overcome the limitation of searching only by metadata is to index the contents of the files themselves. But to do this, you need to be able to read the contents of the file. iFilters are small programs that make it possible for SharePoint to read the contents of files so that they can be indexed. iFilters are usually made available by the company that programmed the software that creates the file. Microsoft has pre-loaded iFilters for most of its own file formats into SharePoint Products and Technologies, but there are exceptions. For example, iFilters for Microsoft Visio and Microsoft One Note are not part of the default load for SharePoint Products and Technologies. Third-party file formats like Adobe Acrobat and Open Office are also not pre-installed. If you use these programs in your environment, you should consider loading the iFilter for the appropriate format.