Hints and Tips

Certainly you should never use folders to classify content – that’s what metadata is for.
You may use them to group related items sometimes, however Document Sets are better and, in any case, folders should never be more than 1 level deep (no
nesting).

Pre-build content repositories (lists and libraries) for things you know you need to store, developing appropriate content types, metadata, views etc. to support these specific documents. Ensure these areas are used for known content ( and is allow shared drives, email sahring etc).

Also create less structured libraries for general documents within teams, where you don’t know what kind of content needs to be stored. Use tags and keywords to manage the unplanned content and review it often to see if more structure is
needed for emerging topics and activities.

Work out what things your staff MUST do (mandated tasks) and things you like them to do (non-mandated tasks). Apply strong directives around the former with good governance.

Use encouragement, social gaming, appeals to better nature and other soft approaches to foster useful behaviour around knowledge sharing and desirable habits that aren’t mandated.

Take away users’ ‘crutches’ for mandated activities – if  your staff directory is working well in SharePoint then actively remove paper copies, email version and
other applications – make staff use the definitive tool.

Not everything needs to be or can be planned. Use OneNote (it’s part of Microsoft Office and everyone in the NHS is licensed to use it) as a great tool for
capturing notes, ideas, bits of emails and other ad hoc or temporary information. Encourage staff to remove information from emails and store it properly in OneNote. Create your OneNote notebooks in SharePoint libraries (we suggest a dedicated OneNote library for each department, project etc.), which will ensure content is synchronised across the whole team.

SharePoint libraries can hold large numbers of documents, images and items. Views are an essential way of helping users see the documents etc. allowing content to be filtered, sorted and grouped; to provide just the columns of information they need without having to open each item to review its properties; or to change the way the items are displayed, for example as a list or as boxed items or a list with a preview.

Managed metadata and appropriate taxonomies allows users to select keywords from existing lists and trees of terms, improving consistency and making it easier for users to add keywords. It also helps improve search results etc.

Instead of creating a list in Excel and asking staff to update it there, move it into SharePoint (you can even directly import existing lists into SharePoint from
Excel – it only takes 5 minutes). Once in SharePoint you can manage it much more effectively (multi-user access, version control, views, approvals etc) and other applications in SharePoint can use it as a lookup list etc. And you don’t need to open Excel every time you want to use it.

Most organisations have out of date or costly point-solution applications running on individual PCs or, even worse, tying up a server. Rebuild these in SharePoint to bring them up to date, avoid paying license or maintenance fees and to release the hardware they are running on.