SharePoint's like an I.T. Swiss-army knife—it does collaboration, document management, content management, business intelligence, and just about everything else.  For end users, though, the complexity of SharePoint can be daunting.  And when SharePoint is implemented without planning, many organizations find themselves with a tangle of hundreds or thousands of unconnected sites.

SharePoint is a powerful platform for collaboration and content management, and a little bit of planning around information architecture--navigation, metadata and search--will reduce the frustration of end users, make searching and finding information more intuitive, and boost the value organizations get from their SharePoint investment.

In this one-hour session we'll cover the best practices we've learned about creating effective information architectures for SharePoint.  We'll discuss how you can create navigation that works, use metadata effectively, adapt SharePoint to fit your content and user needs, and get the most out of search. And we'll also share our thoughts on some common pitfalls--like content migration and governance-- that we've experienced working on large SharePoint websites and intranets.

Session Leaders

Andrew Wright

Andrew is a senior user experience designer at nForm where he sketches and creates prototypes of websites, applications, mobile apps and Intranets for a variety of clients.  He’s also an experienced visual designer and front-end developer who's applied his skills on a range of SharePoint 2007 and 2010 projects.

Johanna Dietrich

Johanna Dietrich is a seasoned user experience and information architecture consultant who’s planned, developed and managed large-scale websites and intranets.  She’s worked for the Alberta Government, Capital Health, Alberta Health Services, PCL, the Edmonton Police Service and others. Before she started her career on the web Johanna was a staff writer for the Edmonton Journal. She holds a BA from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario.