using sharepoint for knowledge management: creating the knowledge market presented by jennifer...
DESCRIPTION
Using SharePoint for Knowledge Management: Creating the Knowledge Market Learn how a law firm migrated their knowledge management resources from several separate databases into Sharepoint 2010. The goal of finding a new knowledge management system was to integrate these separate resources and provide additional functionality to make it faster and easier to find, update and maintain, as well as share and rate content. Success would be measured by increased use of firm precedents overall and significant time savings in finding appropriate resources. A completely new user experience for searching and browsing content based on a user’s practice area was designed and user tested. The session will touch upon migrating documents, the importance of managed metadata and governance in the term store, document libraries and custom document content types, building useful faceted search, search results webparts and ranking models using Sharepoint 2010 search.TRANSCRIPT
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July 20, 2013
Jennifer McNenly, M.A., M.L.S.Knowledge Systems Product ArchitectOsler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
[email protected]:mcnenlyj
Using SharePoint for Knowledge ManagementCreating the Knowledge MarketPresented at SharePoint Saturday Toronto
Knowledge Management at Osler
The firm: Osler is a leading business law firm practising
nationally and internationally from offices across Canada and in New York.
425 Lawyers 5 Offices 21 Practice Areas
Knowledge Management: 1 Chief Knowledge Officer 7 KM Lawyers 2 Assistants and me…
Pain points with finding Knowledge Management resources
Lawyers had to go to several places to find knowledge management resources (e.g. precedents, research, publications and closing books databases).
Search via the database software offered no refiners/facets.
Though databases were indexed as BCS data sources in our SharePoint 2010 search, the shortcomings of the OOB refiners meant results were inaccurate and misleading.
The Problem with OOB SharePoint 2010 Search Results: Refiners!
• By default only the first 50 items in your search results will be used to generate refiners/facets (You can increase this setting up to a maximum of 500).
• FAST Search or SharePoint 2013 Search have true deep refiners/facets. However, we had not decided on an enterprise search engine and SharePoint 2013 had not been released when we started the project.
FindIt! SharePoint 2010 out of the box search... with some customization
Osler Best Bet
Title is a combination of fields from the Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
BCS external data source name
This search works as it just yields 111 results but a search for just the word “contracts” would have thousands of results and the refiners would not reflect all the results
Building the Business Requirements
Reviewed previous KM surveys and metrics. Interviewed a group of users on how and what
they typically search and their main pain points. Had KM lawyers rank search functionality
features they wanted to see in a new system. Created wireframes with sample searches and
asked for more feedback from the user group. Used an external vendor to code the
SharePoint solution. Internal resources were used for building the environment and cleaning up and migrating the content.
Overview of the Solution
Created a taxonomy in the term store. Created a custom document content type with additional
functionality such as ratings and see also references. Uploaded the documents and their metadata into
SharePoint document libraries using our custom upload tool.
Customized SharePoint 2010 search to have true deep refiners and item counts where the user could search or browse.
Held usability tests with the user group to fine tune search and results screens.
Deployed and performance tested the solution in Dev/QA/Production environments.
Term Store Management in SharePoint 2010 – Managed Metadata
Managed taxonomy store
Term set and terms
Cleaned up a master taxonomy in excel and imported it into the Term Store prior to uploading documents
Enterprise Keywords/Folksonomy
Populated many of the Enterprise keywords based on the keywords field in the databases we were importing
Osler Know How Document Content Type
Custom RDF Creator & Upload Tool
• Generated rdf (xml) files for each document based on the metadata in the records in the databases.
• Uploaded the documents and their corresponding rdf metadata files into SharePoint document libraries using our new content type.
• Updated the keywords in the Term Store as it uploaded.
Knowledge Market Search / Browse Screen
Search or Browse based on what practice group you are in
Selecting a practice group allows you to view custom resources, search only that group’s content or browse their legal topics.
Search Tips and Links of Interest are useful for any users. Training material is essentially just a 2 page tip sheet.
Practice Group Resources
• Driven by a summary links list
Click icon to add clip art
Browse my legal topics
Able to see just your group’s legal topics with exact counts or see all topics across the firm.
Knowledge Market
Search suggestions as you type based on certain managed metadata columns.
Search Results
Best Bets for search terms entered rise to the top based on ranking by KM lawyers.
There are 9 refiners: Practice group/Department, Resource Type, Legal Topics, Document Type, Matter Type, Office, Author, Year and Language. All, except Year, are managed metadata fields. Planning to add Industry and Client and Matter number.
Search Results – Browse All on a refiner
True Deep Refiners with counts when you click Browse All.
Search Results – More Information screen
KM lawyer rating of the precedent helps drive ranking.
Enterprise Keywords or folksonomy comes from this column.
See Also References – using summary links
Other features
Warnings display in the More Information screen as well as on the search results screen.
Edit icon shows based on permissions. Visitors do not see it.
KM Lawyers put ratings on important documents which also helps rank them higher.
Feedback: Users can contact the KM lawyer if they have a question about a particular resource. The email option opens an email with the link to the More Info screen they are on.
Custom Ranking ModelGet-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication | Get-SPEnterpriseSearchRankingModel – to confirm custom ranking model and GUIDGet-SPEnterpriseSearchMetadataManagedProperty – check the pid of your managed properties
Custom ranking model in an xml file
Reference the model in the core search results webpart
Where we are now
We are in pilot phase in Production with our original user group.
Added a French interface for our Montreal office users.
Rollout firmwide in mid to late August. KM lawyers to demo solution to their respective
practice groups. Track metrics regularly. Success will be measured
by increased use of content and time savings. Conduct issue/user feedback review sessions as
necessary. Upgrade to Sharepoint 2013 planned for Q1 2014.
Lessons learned
Adequate staffing is key to keeping a project on time.
The solution is working fine with 35000 documents but not sure how scalable it is with larger amounts of documents (we had tested up to 75000). Upgrade to SharePoint 2013 will address this concern as it has true, deep refiners.
Usability matters! We learned something new every time we asked our user group for feedback and incorporated it into an iterative design.
Other things we are working on
Webpart for creating a searchable ebook out of a document library eg. training guides
Thanks to our sponsors!
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Toronto SharePoint Users Grouphttp://www.meetup.com/TorontoSPUG/
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