Info 202 Fall 2011

I’m currently working on a project at work involving
migration to a CRM, a topic that was recently discussed in class and
discussion. The CRM we are migrating to is Microsoft SharePoint. I work for a
small college and most of the “administrative files” (files used by offices for
day to day functions) are stored on a shared drive. This shared drive has
almost open access, meaning people are free to add, rename, move, delete and
basically do whatever to files and folders. Of course important information are
stored elsewhere in databases with better access controls but what ended up
happening is that the shared drives ease of use quickly caused people to
include files that were somewhat important, at least for certain functions of
each office. This shared drive grew over time and we were left with a massive
mess, some of the main issues being:

• People
  organized files their own way, such as naming folders “files to give to Mr.
  Smith”;
• People created large
  amounts of copies, especially when they were afraid to delete old versions;
• 
  People copied files to
  their own computers and soon it became unclear which was the “official” file;
• Employees that left the
  company just left, and their personal file naming convention remained;
• New employees did not know
  what to make of others named files so they just recreated their own;
• And a lot more issues…<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

So, a project has been underway for some time to migrate
everything to SharePoint. Initially we knew that we had to make sites for each
office, and that is what we did, but then for each offices sub-site, we wanted
to have the office decide how to organize it. Meaning, we wanted each office to
develop “appropriate” sub-sites that stored related information correlating to
the functions of the office. Big mistake. The proposals we received for the
organization of the offices sub-sites were basically a duplicate of the shared
folder. Why? Here are my thoughts

• People
  can be lazy and when they are used to a folder structure (shared drive). They
  will try to preserve that
  same folder structure, except now in a nice web format;
• Not everyone knows how to
  use technology well (I’m referring more to the “experienced” users). For example, some may not know
  how to take advantage of lists in SharePoint, and so they just copy the same excel spreadsheet (training for these
  types of skills is difficult);
• A large group cannot
  develop a “proper” organization, so either the group collectively comes up  with a compromised mess or they
  have each person individually organizes their own section, which often differed in concept with how
  another person organized their section, so it looked strange as a whole.

After this fun exercise, the approach we took was to have a
technically knowledgeable person act as the lead to organize the sub-sites
based on subject matter. That person would develop a draft organization plan,
share it with the office, modify it based on “good” feedback and make any final
decisions as to how the sub-sites would be organized. Was the organization
biased? Probably. Could it have been organized differently? You bet. But this
actually worked out very well and it was quick because there was one person in
charge for each sub-site. The drawback was that it was extremely stressful because
that lead person had to basically learn everything about an office in order to
organize it, and who likes to learn everything about accounting? (I apologize
to those who like accounting).

This project is still in motion and we are close to
finishing. I would recommend to anyone who has to deal with a similar task by
first understanding as best you can what you are trying to organize (this
really was key) and second to try taking the lead or formulating a very small
group of technically proficient people to make final decisions on what
organizing principles and schemes you will use. And I wouldn’t worry so much if
the user is initially uncomfortable with your organization, if it makes sense,
then they usually adapt.