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In this Lenten season we shed our wintery garments for the faster step of a lighter spring, How light our step depends on how much baggage we're willing to haul to the next station.

When it comes to those brimming cartons of virtual folders there is only one sure thing: the goal of driving costs from systems means banishing uncertainty to some offshore containment facility. And how do we send these endless files of hesitation packing? Here's the formula:

Not sure + outdated = (gone, fini, bub-eye...)

If you've calculated right we now know What's curbside-worthy in the cart loads we're hand-trucking up the tailgate ramps of SharePoint Migration Van Lines. And it's pounds lighter than when we started.

In our case we're not intentionally trimming down to look buff for this summer's tanning season (although a protracted data cleanse is good for the metabolism of our document lifecycles as well as the clearing of our own blockages). It's that we're picking a specific battle  with our old nemesis -- hesitation. His first impulse? Fretting, catastrophizing, doubtful ... about what goes where.

Now as any hardened silo herder knows the moment this document location crap is even a question is the death spiral for participatory ECM. It's the moment the fence-sitters within our firewalls cannot be bothered with collaboration and its chronic inconveniences vis-a-vis SharePoint. Marginalizing the "where" excuse means the ultimate ECM tummy tuck. That's right. I'm talking dramatic site library reductions. How steep? To a countable number within the range of top-level rectangles one descending level below the CEO. Anything over that would require two clicks.

All those document fad diets that you read about in the cloud won't make it so. Here are the four success factors for abolishing the "where" problem of location-based architectural logic:

1. Worship at the metadata shrine every day. That's the only way to make your enterprise fully search, not site-driven.

2. Come to feel the love blossoming this spring from Content Organizer. Configure it as the universal drop-off center. At last -- a reliable counterweight on the content (production) supply end to match our global search capabilities on the demand (consumer) side.

3. Build workflows to auto-populate the project details from our accounting systems once the drop-off lands at the site library door.

4. Let our territorial fence-sitters console themselves with dictatorial control over their own personal IP legacies holed up in their My Site collections (see last week's riffing on Billy Joel's beloved My Sites anthem/bender).

Ultimately the great pre-migratory purge will detoxify our content, keep the new ECM fighting trim, and make a clean break -- not with the past but with the pack rats in our metadata midst.