Some thoughts about OneNote…

I am an avid OneNote user.  I’ve been using Microsoft OneNote for several years, and it’s a must-have application for me.  It helps me stay organized amid the chaos of competing priorities, fast-moving projects, and a busy family.   In the meantime Microsoft has been making serious investments into OneNote, making it available across several mobile platforms and integrating it with OneDrive and SharePoint Online.  The OneNote user experience is now quite smooth between mobile and desktop, and the value proposition for OneNote has never been greater.

At the same time, when I look around I see that many individuals and organizations have access to OneNote (it comes preinstalled with several flavors of Microsoft Office and the mobile app is free).   However, they’re not using it to capture notes or organize their information.  They’re not using a competing product, either.  For most people, pen & paper is still the preferred method for taking notes.  Information arriving electronically is captured in email or in folders or documents which makes it difficult to find information and keep it updated.  For many people, things that they know or want to keep are spread across multiple sources and repositories, and it takes a lot of mental effort to find and retrieve information.  Old habits die hard, I suppose…

Our mission here at ITKM Systems is to help our clients capture and organize their informal knowledge assets.  OneNote provides a great platform for accomplishing this goal.  Over the next few months, you will see some new content on this blog related to how to leverage OneNote for best results and achieve maximum productivity. We will be spending more time with OneNote, figuring out the best layouts, the best templates and the best ways to capture, organize, and retrieve your knowledge.

SharePoint and Office 365 Metadata Survey White Paper

Concept Searching, a company specializing in advanced semantic metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy management, has posted a whitepaper dealing with SharePoint and Office 365 Metadata survey that they conducted between November 2013 and February 2014.  They received 396 completed surveys from companies that use SharePoint as a collaboration platform in one form or another.  As I read through the survey, I found a few interesting results:

• Office 365 has been deployed by 34% of organizations, and another 21% have plans to deploy O365 in the future.  30% of respondents have no plans to deploy O365.  These numbers seem to suggest that Office 365 is gaining traction among customers – in the near future, over half of SharePoint customers could be using O365.
• On the list of upcoming challenges and priorities, text analytics was rated as the highest priority item (86%).  Content management was rated lowest (42%).  This was surprising to me as I expected that most clients would see content management as a high priority item.
• Information Governance: 45% of respondents indicated that there was no information governance plan in their organization.  For a consultant, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  There is clearly a need for information governance services in the marketplace; however, the service offering must be clear and compelling enough to motivate the customers to move forward on it.

You can read the entire whitepaper (with many other interesting results) here:

Click to access CS_SharePoint_Office365_Survey.pdf

 

Governance structures

Matt Moore posted this in the SIKM Leaders newsgroup on Yahoo, and I found it very useful to help think about the governance structures we use. This could apply to SharePoint governance as well as KM or other systems and frameworks…

From http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/sikmleaders/ on 5/26/09:

KM governance issues often remind me of political models:

– Are we China? [Top-down control with minimal accountability and heavy sanctions for disagreement]
– Are we the UK? [Centralized governance model with some accountability]
– Are we the US? [Demarcated split between “Federal” and “State” control]
– Are we Switzerland? [Most of the power lies in the regions with a relatively weak central government]

Of course, many organisations might be uncomfortable with these analogies.

Matt Moore

Check out Susan Hanley’s site…

I came across Susan Hanley’s site today. She’s a KM guru with expertise in portal solutions and content management. It turns out, I am reading a book that she contributed to, “Essential SharePoint 2007”. (I didn’t realize this until I saw the book’s cover on her site.) Check out her site for lots of good info on things like 10 My Site Best Practices and Sample SharePoint Style Guide. My favorite is Sample Stakeholder Interview Guide – we need more docs like that one!

Her blog is located here. I’m definitely adding it to my Links.