Building a sustainable information architecture

Business use case: Benefits documents

Join the Ask Sympraxis team for this session focusing on building sustainable information architecture (IA) through the use case of benefit documents management in your Microsoft 365 environment. From backend management of the content owners, to easy front-end consumption in your intranet, we walk through many of the challenges that are unique to benefits documents.

Maturity model approach

The Maturity Model for Microsoft 365, based on the capability maturity model, takes a holistic view of this technology and focuses on different business outcomes so you can distinguish your current state versus your desired state. These are broken down into five different levels of maturity for each of the various competencies. In this session we apply the Maturity Model to benefits documents and explain the impacts of each level. This will help guide you in deciding what solution works best for your organization.

Introduction to IA in SharePoint

We cover an overview of better practices when building your information architecture in SharePoint Online. This overview includes the use of interstitial and parent content types to build a sustainable information architecture in SharePoint Online.

Information Architecture example

Although benefits vary from organization to organization, how they are surfaced remains more consistent. In order to be easily consumable to the end users, we suggest aligning to common internet practices and focusing on the simplification of benefits. In this session we use a United States-based example to demonstrate the art of the possible when you use the content type hub to create your benefits information architecture.

Using benefits IA in pages

Information architecture helps manage documents on the backend, but more importantly, it provides superpowers for sorting, filtering, and presenting content in different ways for the end users. By using the Modern PnP Modern Search web part this session discusses the different use cases, benefits, and variations of how the content is presented.

All Resources

• Building Metadata in SharePoint Online - Emily Mancini
• Introduction to content types and content type publishing - Microsoft Support
• Content Type Propagation | Microsoft Learn
• Create or customize a content type - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn
• Introduction - PnP Modern Search (v4) (microsoft-search.github.io)
• Using the Modern PnP Search Web Part - Emily Mancini

Do you have any questions for us? Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskSympraxis and mention @SympraxisC.