So the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 wrapped up on Thursday. What an amazing ride! It blows me away to see how SharePoint is absolutely exploding. It fires up my passion for SharePoint technology even more!
Paul Learning, Andy Hopkins, and I did finally present during the last session slot of the conference. There weren’t as many attendees as I would have like to have seen, but what the heck, I usually bail early on the last day too! Anyway, with the smaller group of only about 30 folks it was a less formal session. We were able to engage in some quality discussion around scalability and performance.
One person asked me a question that I’d like to address here. He talked about the fact that they have a large volume of files in FileNet. They’d like to move them into SharePoint but they can’t come up with a way to logically group them such that they could keep the site collections/content databases inside of the 100GB recommended size. I asked him how his users accessed the content in FileNet. He didn’t want to go there because the answer was that they “searched” for the content. Then he said that his users had been exposed to SharePoint and had been accustomed to just navigating straight to the documents they need.
So of course my answer to him was something like, use MOSS search… embrace the search… love the search…! Search is like the keys to the kingdom in a large scale MOSS implementation! He didn’t want to hear that answer unfortunately. That brings me to two points.
First, don’t expose your users to technology you don’t want them to have. He feels like limiting direct navigation is like taking candy from a baby and I agree to an extent. So I encourage everyone to spend the time up front to design the system and train users up in the way that they should go from the beginning (whenever possible… I know it’s hard).
Second, if you want to unlock the power of your MOSS implementation. You have to imerse yourself in the search capabilities of the MOSS platform. Mind what you have learned! Save you it can! Ok, enough with the Yoda references. Seriously, I get that it doesn’t matter what you put in if you can’t get it back out easily. But we have to break the habits of the S:\ drive. Hierarchical data structure doesn’t help the new employee trying to navigate through 4TB of content!
Russ
