Back in October of 2016, I wrote an article about “Avoiding the SharePoint potholes.” I received a lot of nice feedback on that article, and much of that information is still true today. However, the SharePoint of 2016, and today’s Microsoft 365 with SharePoint online platforms are vastly different. This article is the first in a series about how to leverage these changes to make your deployment shine.
What’s still true? Search is key!
Design for Enterprise Search
After all, why are you implementing the system? Finding something you added yesterday isn’t usually a problem. Finding something you added two years ago, let alone ten years ago is a very different issue. Studies show that users spend (okay waste) considerable time trying to find content. Just relying on the keyword search is not a recipe for success. Imagine if Amazon or Barnes and Noble just gave you a keyword search with no ability to filter the results.
The out-of-the-box search engine is better than searching your network drive, but still falls short of success. Imagine if you could filter your searches by known organization or industry classifications or taxonomies. If you could filter by department, facility, topic, asset type and other classification that’s already known to the organization, your users would be much more productive. Imagine if you could go to a Geographical Information System (GIS) map and click on a facility and bring up all of the permits, manuals, and procedures related to that facility using a tablet. Would that be useful? Of course, it would. You’ll need to establish some metadata standards and taxonomies, but that’s what we’re here for with Information Architecture Services.
SharePoint Search
SharePoint Search provided improved capabilities for search filtering but requires a strong understanding of how to develop and manage the search schema. It does allow for the integration of existing taxonomies which can be very useful for search refiners. This lets users leverage existing classifications that include the terminology they are used to seeing in their Asset Management and ERP platforms making their search more familiar.
In Microsoft 365 Modern (versus Classic) environments, you’ll need a bit of help with SharePoint Search to utilize capabilities that were available in the Classic environment. This comes in the form of web parts available here from GitHub. These web parts are easy to use and very effective in providing a rich, robust search experience with search refiners / filters and synonyms to make your search truly effective.
Microsoft Search
Microsoft Search provides the ability to search more broadly across the Microsoft 365 platform, and also tailors search results to the user helping to provide more relevant search results. It does not yet provide the search refiners, but does have improved capabilities including Bookmarks, Synonym, Locations, Floor Plans, and Questions and Answers. Therefore, you’ll want to leverage both search experiences to make the most of your enterprise search experience.
What about Artificial Intelligence?
Hold that thought! We’re going to focus on that in our next installment.