Leslie Anjan's blog

Having a solid information architecture (IA) is an important prerequisite for realizing a well-maintained and well-performing intranet. Good IA helps people find what they need and accomplish the tasks they want to complete – in a way that makes sense to them. A great IA helps improve user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity, reduce IT cost, reduce information overload, and minimize governance compliance and bad information risk. Great IA takes good planning. It requires knowledge of the domain or content, understanding the user and user experiences, and awareness of approaches and best practices in Microsoft SharePoint. An important best practice is providing a consistent experience for everyone. Many people complain that going from site to site across their organization’s intranet feels disjointed. Each site looks different from the other with similar types of information scattered in different places. While it’s great to allow site owners flexibility, without some basic des...

Microsoft announced the General Availability of its so-called ‘records management’ solution for Microsoft 365 on 30 April 2020. The announcement noted that organisation would be able to use the records management solution to: Classify, retain, review, dispose, and manage content without compromising productivity or data security. Leverage machine learning capabilities to identify and classify regulatory, legal, and business critical records at scale. Demonstrate compliance with regulations through defensible audit trails and proof of destruction. Proposed licensing model Microsoft have published extensive information in its service description for the Security and Compliance elements of Microsoft 365. It is a good idea to discuss these options with a Microsoft licensing partner. At a general level, the difference between the ‘information governance’ (E3/E5) and ‘records management’ (E5 only) options are as follows:   Info Governance – ‘Broad policies...

I have heard from almost all customers during the initial discovery stage of the Intranet project highlighting their current Information Architecture issues. You would have heard these words – “Un Manageable, Grown exponentially, inconsistent, unusable”. Working for Prometix as consultant delivery IA in SharePoint and other Office 365 application, here are few pointers to consider & think about.  Having a solid information architecture (IA) is an important prerequisite for realizing a well-maintained and well-performing intranet. Good IA helps people find what they need and accomplish the tasks they want to complete – in a way that makes sense to them. A great IA helps improve user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity, reduce IT cost, reduce information overload, and minimize governance compliance and bad information risk. Great IA takes good planning. It requires knowledge of the domain or content, understanding of the customer inner workings, understanding the user an...

As a SharePoint consulting practice, we at Prometix had a chance to implement a Microsoft 365 Records Management service This is a fairly new service and Microsoft announced in May the commercial release of the Microsoft 365 Records Management service. This service, which lets organisations apply "labels" to documents, as well as machine learning to automatically apply those labels, is designed to address legal compliance tracking issues for organisations. Microsoft claims it'll help demonstrate compliance with regulations through defensible audit trails and proof of destruction. This will assist in integrating with Business Intelligence such PowerBI, and artificial intelligence such as Azure services. The Records Management service is currently available through the  Microsoft 365 Compliance Center . Organisations need to have Microsoft 365 E5/A5 or Microsoft 365 Insider Risk Management licenses to use the service, which gives them the rights to automatically apply ...