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Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 provides an efficient and user-friendly way for individuals, teams and departments to quickly create customizable collaboration and content management sites. Organizations are relying on the integrated suite of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 applications to enable many key information and content management initiatives, including support for portals, enterprise search and content management. SharePoint facilitates the ad hoc creation of sites across the enterprise. Typically individual groups, teams, or departments create these sites and tailor them to their specific needs at that specific time. Although this gives teams flexibility to tackle their immediate problems, it results in SharePoint metadata structures that are inconsistent across the organization.
In order to enable this decentralized provisioning model, Microsoft has limited the scope of content type metadata to the site collection level. In most deployment architectures there may be tens, hundreds, or thousands of site collections. However, there is no facility to centrally manage the consistency and accuracy of the metadata across an enterprise-wide SharePoint deployment.
Further complicating the problem for most organizations are the multiple systems in addition to SharePoint that store vital information. The inability to rationalize metadata structures in SharePoint with structures deployed in other systems limits the ability to achieve true enterprise-wide content access and exchange. Additionally, SharePoint limits the structure of metadata to small flat value lists. Organizations that use taxonomies, thesauri, or ontology’s to add relevance and context to metadata will not be able to manage those linguistic structures in SharePoint.
Finally, SharePoint lacks capabilities to allow collaboration across the enterprise to continually develop and evolve metadata standards. Typically, in larger organizations, the people responsible for managing the metadata structures are distributed organizationally and geographically. Without tools to manage the process of evolving standards, changes cannot be made fast enough to meet the dynamic needs of the organization.
SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite for Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 (SES) resolves these SharePoint issues by providing a framework that enables companies to model and connect the structures and relationships of the metadata across the entire SharePoint environment. SES continuously updates and synchronizes metadata across SharePoint site collections, Web applications and farms by leveraging and extending SharePoint’s native capabilities.
Libraries and lists are the “containers” of SharePoint where unstructured content is stored. SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite creates the definitions of these containers and associates specified metadata, including content types, site columns, and columns. This ensures that the content checked into these containers include approved and consistent metadata.
SchemaLogic connects to all SharePoint sites, site collections, Web applications, or farms in a deployment. When a content type is created in SharePoint, it is linked to the corresponding semantic definition in SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite. When updates are made to the SchemaLogic master model, they are automatically propagated to content types and site columns in all linked SharePoint locations. In addition, SES for SharePoint 2007 provides administrators, managers, and executives worldwide with the ability to quickly view where individual SharePoint site’s metadata structures are out of compliance with the master semantic model.
SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite for SharePoint 2007 is currently operating in one of the largest energy companies in the United States. This industry leading company has selected Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the global collaboration and content management platform for its 50,000+ employees in over 100 countries. When completed, this will be one of the largest implementations of SharePoint in the world. Critical to the success of the project is the implementation of an enterprise-wide metadata plan. This enterprisewide metadata plan will ensure that documents and other information can be stored, retrieved and shared across the global enterprise. This global company has turned to SchemaLogic as the only enterprise scalable platform for collaboration and management of the metadata plan, instantiation of the plan in SharePoint, and to synchronize the evolving metadata across the entire global SharePoint environment. The results include improved governance over its unstructured content, improved regulatory compliance and information access to millions of documents in its repository.
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