Part 3 of (hmm, still don't know yet) | Part 1 | Part 2

It's easy to get lost if you don't know where you're going

I have to apologize for those of you younger than me (and I am not that old, so stop your laughing) and have never seen this version of Zelda. But still, you should jump on an emulator and give it a shot. It was tons of fun!

Actually, it was extremely frustrating, but it was still fun. In fact the first time you enter the lost woods, or the lost hills – oops! You're stuck. You can walk little Link in any direction you like, and there you are back at the same place. Trapped. And, I refuse to believe that any regular person actually figured out how to get out of those places the first time they entered unless they had a little cheat sheet. There had to be insider help. Once you knew where you were going though (West, North, West, South, West, I think). Actually, it was easier than that to get out, but not getting where you wanted to go (either the graveyard or level 5).

So, again with the SharePoint tie in. Can you draw the connection? This one actually isn't too tough. See there are a thousand and one ways you can go when you start a SharePoint deployment. Some of them leave you stuck right where you started: a mish-mash of documents/pages that no one really uses. Other paths get you down the road, but still not really where you want to be. For instance, you might have a few users/groups that get great value from the new systems, but the majority still rely on their file shares and email routing of documents (maxing out their inbox of course).

And for the lucky ones who have all the information at the beginning, they get out of the woods and into that next level. This is where your entire organization (or most of it at least) adopts the new culture of collaboration. They are using quality searching that you configured for them; they have site aggregations from the data view webparts you configured; they have line of business application access to all their data from a central point. And best of all, they have their team sites and project sites for sharing information. Then, that last westward turn out of the woods: their tacit knowledge suddenly gets published for everybody to see in Wikis and Blogs.

As if you haven't heard this from me already, plan your SharePoint projects with great detail. Really focus on governance (I will cover this topic soon) and Information Architecture (Taxonomy for those who don't know me well enough yet). Those are the most critical aspects of a successful SharePoint deployment. If you get those wrong, you will spend months trying to find your way through the woods/hills of SharePoint.