Latest Information Architecture & Governance topics

We had another highly productive “Ask Sympraxis Anything” session! Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who submitted questions and actively participated. Here are the key insights and takeaways from the session! What are the ramifications of breaking permission inheritance in SharePoint online? We highly emphasize the importance of avoiding haphazardly breaking permissions. In the past this resulted in performance issues. This isn’t as much of an issue now as the landscape of SharePoint has evolved, especially in SharePoint Online.

Intranet owners have a wealth of resources at their disposal, catering to their needs across various aspects of intranet management. Whether you’re looking to configure your intranet, enhance your knowledge through self-guided learning, explore powerful user configurations, or seek inspiration from configuration examples, there are numerous community-driven assets available to you. Basic Configuration Intelligent Intranet by Microsoft Intelligent Intranet is a Microsoft site that offers insights into their vision for intranets, providing a comprehensive understanding of what an intranet entails.

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.

SharePoint Search has been available for quite some time and can be managed by a variety of flexible tools. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft Search tends to be more rigid as it’s not as mature. Although Microsoft is constantly adding capabilities to Microsoft Search, we are focusing primarily on SharePoint Search for this article. Building columns In SharePoint, a common use is to build a list or library with columns to organize information.

What is a policy center? For the sake of this session, we are discussing building a policy center. However, what’s covered can really be applied to an infinite number of other types of content. The approaches discussed would work for any distributed content management scenario, which is the ultimate goal we are seeking to achieve. Ideally, we want every department or work group to manage the policies that they own rather than having one site or document library that everyone has to submit their content into.

Do you need an intranet steering committee As your company grows, so does the complexity of your intranet. Ultimately, the need for a steering committee will depend on your company’s size, the complexity, and your intended growth. A steering committee is essentially a group of stakeholders that can speak to the overarching company’s goals, can determine which projects are most important, and in what order each project should be tackled.

Why do content types matter? A content type is a business object, something that can be moved around in your organization, whether it’s document-based or not. Some examples are invoices, contracts, status update, etc. Everything created inherits from an existing content type that can be used as a starting point. An information architecture with effective content types enables users to answer questions like “how many proposals did we lose in the last month?

Accessibility is essential for organizations that want to create and provide high-quality tools that do not exclude people from using their products and services. Web Accessibility It’s important to ensure that your application is usable by all users, regardless of ability. Don’t assume users are using a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Accessibility might be a temporary impairment, like recovering from hand surgery. Accessibility is not always about what you see, for example, a physical impairment, etc.

While we were working on our other sessions on external sharing we realized that there were lots of other miscellaneous things to share about parts of Microsoft 365 that we hadn’t already talked about. So, in this session of Ask Sympraxis we are covering all the rest. OneDrive OneDrive Tenant Level Settings Tenant administrators can set different external sharing policies for both OneDrive and SharePoint. Administrators have the ability to set external sharing policies individually for SharePoint and OneDrive however there is a failsafe.

Tenant-Level Settings Teams Admin Center There are many layers of security which acts like a filter or funnel. When it comes to things like guests or external sharing, it’s important to know that at the tenant level, the tenant admin or teams admin has to turn a couple of switches on or off. The most common factor is differentiating between external users and guest users. External Users External access is less than you think that it is.