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Mastering SharePoint: 3 Proven Strategies for Effective Content Management

Microsoft’s SharePoint is an essential tool for any organisation looking for a system that can help them tackle the long-standing challenges of content management. With its ability to store and manage documents and organise content, SharePoint is a stellar option for delivering content and files to your employees. 

However, mastering SharePoint to ensure that your content workflow is as solid as possible is the only way to ensure that you get the most out of it. After all, being aware of the features and processes you can create in SharePoint will let you take advantage of it, ensuring that your content management system is robust and works exactly how you’d want it.

In this blog, we’re going to delve into three practical and proven strategies that will immediately enhance your Microsoft SharePoint content management capabilities. These strategies will equip you to make the most of what SharePoint has to offer, right from the start.

Strategy 1: Implement a Taxonomy and Metadata Framework

A taxonomy is a classification system that can be used to group and categorise content to ensure that it’s relevant to your organisation’s aims and objectives. Having a taxonomy will ensure that you have a strong foundation for content management and that everyone within your environment can easily find what they need.

For example, a legal department might create categories like “Contracts”, “Regulations”, and “Compliance”, whereas a videography team might have categories like “Raw Footage”, “Edits”, and “Assets”. Figuring out what categories within your taxonomy will help you ensure that you get the most out of it.

By using SharePoint’s managed metadata services to establish a central term store, you’re not just ensuring consistency throughout your team. You’re fostering a collaborative environment where everyone uses the correct tags and terminology, preventing confusion. This means that ultimately, everyone can work in unison, knowing the correct terminology and where to find different categorised items, enhancing the value of teamwork.

However, you’ll also need to train your users to work on this. Training them to use the correct tags and ensuring that everyone knows the importance of proper tagging will help your whole team work more efficiently and effectively, creating a better environment for everyone within your organisation.

Strategy 2: Automate Content Lifecycle Management

Every piece of content you create has a lifecycle that will eventually become useless and no longer need to be active. After all, scouring through so many different files to find what you need will eventually take too much time for it to be reasonable. On top of this, having old content just lying around can be a compliance nightmare.

Using SharePoint to automate your content lifecycle management and ensure that your content lifecycle is carried out correctly is vital, as it will ensure you don’t face any of these problems. However, to use SharePoint for this, you’ll first need to define your company’s content management policies, how long different types of content should be retained, when they should be archived, and when they should be deleted.

Once you’ve created these policies, you can use SharePoint’s Information Management Policies to enforce them automatically. This means that you won’t need to intervene manually, everything will automatically be taken care of, letting you focus on more critical aspects of your organisation.

Eventually, you can implement these into a more comprehensive workflow. This will include content approval and publication and ensure that content follows the lifecycle correctly. It will also make version control and publication schedules far easier. With this, you can automate the whole publishing process and lifecycle without needing to manually do it all.

Strategy 3: Leverage SharePoint Premium for Advanced Content Management

SharePoint Premium is a must-have for any business looking to improve its content management. With the inclusion of AI and machine learning, SharePoint Premium can unlock a whole new axis in content management with new ways to automate tasks and analyse data.

In SharePoint Premium, you can create AI-powered models that automatically classify your content and extract valuable information, unlocking insights from your data without manually completing any tasks. For example, you could have a model see that a document is a contract plan and extract all of the critical data relevant to a contract, such as expiration dates and signees, from the document.

In addition, SharePoint Premium lets you take advantage of no-code solutions when integrated with Power Automate, eliminating the need to know complicated code to take advantage of the best features within SharePoint. These can trigger automatic action based on analysis and detection, meaning that you’ll never have to intervene manually, saving time and making you more productive.

All of this can be done in SharePoint Premium (with Power Automate) with no code, meaning you can quickly build these tools without hiring someone knowledgeable in coding and app construction. Instead, these automated workflows can be set up in a few clicks, significantly streamlining your content workflow. With this, you’ll save everyone time and ensure that every aspect of content management is taken care of.

How to Get Started

Microsoft SharePoint is a great content management system that can be used extensively to ensure that you can efficiently manage content, making your life and the lives of the team around you far more accessible. 

By using taxonomy and implementing tagging, ensuring that you have a proper content lifecycle strategy, and looking into the stellar SharePoint Premium, you can take your content management to the next level, streamlining the process and ensuring that your organisation has everything organised well.

If you want to get started with SharePoint but don’t know how to begin, contact our experts today. We’re here to help and ensure you’re equipped with everything you need to use SharePoint Premium to its fullest potential within your organisation.