There are fashionistas and clothes horsemen. Then there are people who suit up on game day without a clue. Yes, I'm referring to shuffling office park jetsetters like me who answer fashion statements with CSS padding properties.
How you dress says as much about who you expect to see you than it does about the limits of your wardrobe or outfit-matching capacities. So whether we dress to kill or just to survive much depends on where we're seen (and who we're seen with).
Now let's turn those fishbowl windows inward. In a virtual setting like SharePoint whether we're dressed for success or just to schlep depends on who sees what -- especially when those sites and pages are arranged to attract specific communities within our midst. Anyone come to in mind?
Some content curators are the centers of their own carefully curated worlds. That works out ok on a local drive. "But it don't scale good." That's when our searches pull multiple versions all with competing details of the same history.
Local Control, Global Resource
One way to keep consistency high without becoming the ECM killjoy is to let your curators loose inside their own MySite. They'll not only get to pick out those vintage materials cloaked in a dazzling folder structure. They'll also pick their own party guests.
House Guests
Another is to expand the guest list to include some privileged visitors -- those royal dignitaries our accounting ledgers refer to as "clients." MySite collections are anything goes. It's a dorm room with overstuffed drawers spilling into the empty brewskies and pizza boxes -- empty document properties complete the unmarked invitation. A dedicated client site on an extranet means more involved party planning -- impeccable metadata, daily updates, and assiduous reporting.
Front Row Center
The most revealingt display between ECM user-producers and their recipient-audiences happens on the center stage homepage. That's where the staging diverges from the script. Every web-dot-infinity tome delivered from the Church of User Experience offers up the site-as-destination. But the primary purpose of most ECM's is not to capture visitors but enable processes. Seen any visitors in your office lately? They're probably not visiting your intranet no matter how sporty they look that day.
Stickiness on intranets is actually a negative. And the best way to get unstuck is to build an architecture that answers to
actions and decisions -- not to specific locations or destinations. The best ECMs get users where they need to be (and it's not our intranets).