Helen Rayner from Telecom New Zealand is kicking off day two of the NZ SharePoint Conference. Helen and a couple of her colleagues (Ruth and Nadine) are talking on success factors for MOSS 2007 for ECM. Helen, Ruth and Nadine are in the Information Management group at Telecom NZ.

Telecom is a big company (for NZ). With partners included, there’s about 15,000 people. Helen said the current intranet has 13,000 pages.

In Theory
Helen talked about the theory and thinking behind their work.

“ECM” covers web site, documents, collaboration and workflow. The new intranet is in place — the infrastructure is in place. There are three business groups up on the intranet today — Information Management, Wholesale, and Chorus. There are two more groups coming on soon.

Success factors (which were in place before the project started):
– (1) we had a good answer to the question “why now?” With what we are doing, we are asking people to change the way they work. We have to make a case why they should embrace the new.
– … why 1: single system to replace multiple legacy systems
– … why 2: unified search across all
– … why 3: to comply with new strict rules imposed by the government, around sharing
– … why 4: corporate culture is about “one Telecom” now … that works together where it can to succeed.
– (2) ECM is the next logical step in our lifecycle … we had an older intranet, we wanted to upgrade document management system (and deal with the limitations in SharePoint 2003), and people like what we’ve already done.
– (3) a clear governance framework … clear roles and responsibilities, clear content ownership (everyone is responsible for their own information)
– (4) the vision … “one company working together”. We want people to be able to focus on their job.
– (5) a new ECM can be designed to overcome the current limitations in today’s systems
– (6) clear information architecture … including taxonomy, metadata, the design concept (working from collaboration sites that publish through to the intranet)
– (7) establishing a process to roll this out to the business, along with developing a team to support this

These success factors need to be in place before you begin!

In Practice
Ruth talked about putting these ideas into practice:
– Every site has a web part that shows contacts and security … eg, site administrators, business activity administrators, and business owner (a senior manager). These roles are linked to a name, and can be lit up with presence from OCS. A security classification for each sites is also shown, eg, “Internal”, “public”, “confidential”
– Found a way to make security easy; security classifications (above) drive security settings for a site. Once you set the security setting for the site, it sets the right permissions. In every site, there is a page that shows all of the groups accessing the site, the level of access they have, and who is in the group.
– Have linked the security permissions through to business groups in Active Directory.
– Offer a training and help library (a site), to help people learn how to use the new system.
– Each site is populated into a site directory, with some additional metadata being added. Eg, business activity, business group.

Nadine talked about information architecture. Nadine works for SysDoc (another firm), but has been involved in the Telecom project for about 18 months.
– there are seven key business activities … eg, product development, marketing and sales, customer services, technology delivery, technology operations, (#6), and team management.
– these activities are then divided into various sub-activities … and each sub-activity has a related SharePoint site.
– every site has a basic set of metadata attached to it. There is required data to fill out in order to create a site.
– each site can have some metadata set at the site level; whenever a document is added, it is stamped with this metadata.
– like sites are drawn together via summary sites; various ways to browse through, or search into.