Managing Your Transitory Content
Transitory content represents a significant range and volume of content in your organization. It can vary from teams collaborating on document drafts or departmental portal pages, to electronic forms capturing and processing information as part of a business process, and even to ad hoc blog and microblog posts. This diversity can make transitory content feel chaotic, even out of control, all because the content itself is unstructured; however, managing and organizing transitory content generally occurs in the content containers, allowing the content to take whatever shape it requires yet applying order through its container.
The chapters in this part look at how to manage transitory content as I guide you through how to analyze and design solutions for different kinds of transitory content. I start with a particularly popular kind of transitory content in most Microsoft SharePoint environments, where I describe how to enable and manage collaboration content. From there, I discuss how you can classify and organize content, as well as how to implement and configure aspects of your SharePoint environment for content classification and management. Finally, I guide you through how to manage your web content and electronic forms, including sections on how to design and implement approval workflows to formalize the content creation process.
As you analyze and consider your transitory content, remember that just because it is transitory does not mean that it lacks importance to your organization. Some transitory content will progress into official records, preserving evidentiary accounts of transactions, decisions, and historical references; but other transitory content will exist for a period before you ultimately dispose of it. Users likely interact with transitory content more than official records in the course of their job functions simply because transitory content is active and current. Planning and managing your transitory content and its related processes will facilitate effective content use in your organization, and then later, it will transition richer information into an official record. It starts where I start, with enabling effective collaboration.