#SPC12 Sharepoint 2012–New Stuff in Enterprise Content Management

Yawn.  Seriously, who the hell cares about ECM?

Apparently, me, Jim Mason, Tejas Mehta (both MS presenters) and about a 1000 other people crammed into a man-scented sweaty ballroom at #SPC12.

I’ve been working with ECM inside Sharepoint since the last release and really thought it a good step up.  Centralized taxonomy was solid, content types were good if not quite as integrated to Document Center and workflow as I would have liked and the combination of taxonomy with folksonomy and the use of termsets in navigation really jumped us up a level.

The next release is a mountain of gold better than that.  Here’s what I liked:

• Hash tags becomes first level content and can be profiled to associate them with a termset member thereby allowing for a strict correlation between tags users enter (folksonomy) and the centralized term store (taxonomy – which reflects the site content organizing principles)
• The new “drag and drop into a library” feature (direct from the web page) allows inline mass editing of the added documents.  Maybe I should write this as “the finally made list act like Excel and you can really edit the crap out of them.  YAAAAYYYYYY!!!”
• Team sites can have Exchange inboxes.  Pretty cool.  But, even cooler, you can hit them with Outlook like they are your mailbox, send email to them, drag docs into them and even promote an email into the documents folder for the site by dragging it from an email.  Epic.
• All conversations (newsfeeds, etc) become first level content for ECM so they can be managed and searched.
• But, a really cool idea:  Take your termset.  Make it your navigation element for the site.  Then, rather than having the termset nav element return a specific page (for say “marketing”) have it return a page with a content query that uses Search to return everything associated with the element of the termset tied to the navigation bar.  This way, you get ALL content associated with the term (video, power point, conversations, etc) and you DON’T HAVE TO CREATE SEPARATE PAGES!

They then went on to talk about eDiscovery but I didn’t listen as I was deep in a reverie about how to redesign our corporate site.

Man, I love technology.