It has been my experience that users may find it difficult to change their habits from using local drives, file shares, e-mail, etc. to new document management technology.  In addition, if this new document management technology is difficult to use, they tend to revert back to what worked for them in the past; i.e. local drives, file shares, e-mail and so on.  It is critical to address these factors early in the planning and design phases of your implementation.

The primary means of addressing this success factor is to “store information as close to the point of ownership as possible”; giving users a (small) defined set of destinations to store and manage their content.  A common mistake is to allow users to store their content in virtually any place they choose.  Over time, this approach will become cumbersome and, in most cases, virtually impossible to use.

It is recommended you provide users with a set of predefined destinations to store and manage their content.

For example, the set of destinations above will aid with this critical success factor by providing users with a predefined set of locations to store and manage their content.  If the user has departmental content to store and manage, it will be done so in the Intranet (departmental content sites), if they have project content to store and manage, it will be done so in the Projects destination.

The Service and Support destination is designed to provide users with a single location to contact your support services.  In addition this destination would be used to store and manage education materials and links to external education materials.

The Collaboration destination, also referred to as the wild, wild, west, is where work-in-progress content management is accomplished; i.e. a temporary store for document creation and management.  In addition, this destination can be used for social events, general meetings, calendars, user groups and so on.

It is common to separate Information Technology (IT) content from other content on the Intranet.  This is primarily due to the fact that it is rare for this content to be shared with other line-of-business and departmental users.

There are many additional reasons you will find this approach using “destinations” will aid in; these are discussed in further sections of this document.

For example, the set of destinations above will aid with this critical success factor by providing users with a predefined set of locations to store and manage their content.  If the user has departmental content to store and manage, it will be done so in the Intranet (departmental content sites), if they have project content to store and manage, it will be done so in the Projects destination.

The Service and Support destination is designed to provide users with a single location to contact your support services.In addition this destination would be used to store and manage education materials and links to external education materials.

The Collaboration destination, also referred to as the wild, wild, west, is where work-in-progress content management is accomplished; i.e. a temporary store for document creation and management.In addition, this destination can be used for social events, general meetings, calendars, user groups and so on.

It is common to separate Information Technology (IT) content from other content on the Intranet.This is primarily due to the fact that it is rare for this content to be shared with other line-of-business and departmental users.

There are many additional reasons you will find this approach using “destinations” will aid in; these are discussed in further sections of this document.

To further our example implementation to address this critical success factor, the figure above demonstrates an approach to Human Resources storing and managing their content.  Human Resources employees, are provided with a single destination to store and manage all of their related departmental content.

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