From Content to Knowledge using the Microsoft SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva Topics

>> Register for the upcoming webinar.

Every company struggles with how to move from what many call the “Wild West” of content services. How can content and files be tamed? You’ll need to build an approach for how to Tame this content, but even better would be to unlock the organizational knowledge… classify it, label it, automate and and integrate approvals, and highlight topics with definitions creating organizational knowledge. Microsoft’s latest advancements and release of SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics both provide key features in helping you go from content to knowledge.

For any customer that’s starting from scratch, you’ll notice most content is NOT ready to be analyzed by SharePoint Syntex. I recommend a how a systematic approach to help you get your arms around your data first before moving it into content libraries in SharePoint or into a Content Center. For example discovery can help you first get a handle on repositories size and scale, but some rigorous “File Analysis” to remove Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (Referred to as ROT) information in conjunction with a solid information architecture practice ensures a consistent and reliable content services program. Studies show that 30-40% of all content stored by businesses is considered ROT – understanding and managing this content before it moves to the Cloud is critical to an organization’s search and content services strategies.

Discover

Where does your content live? Most likely it is spread out in Box, Dropbox, Google Drives, FileNet, File Shares, Blob storage, SharePoint and Teams. Many of us would like to skip this step, but the liability of what is being hoarded for years and years simply continues to grow. What is it? How much of it is ROT? What kind of richness or liability does it carry with it?

Information Architecture

Before we get to far, there’s the question of where data should be stored. As you find what I like to call the organizational knowledge aka crown jewels there will be the question beyond the storage mechanism which is the structure. The information architecture to describe and house the knowledge so it can be more easily retrieved. Some companies may design knowledge bases, others content centers, and yet still repositories structured by Team, organization, or simply described by taxonomies and tagging. The task here is to ensure you have a good structure that is often based on the technology it is built on. For Teams they are Teams and channels, for SharePoint they are sites, libraries and lists.

File Analysis

You’ll find the further you dig into the new technology from Microsoft not all files are created equally. Microsoft Office content has many attributes and is structured in a way that’s easy for search to pull content out of it, but what do you do with images, tiff, faxes, and scanned content. There’s also PDFs and bulk and dumps. Any file share migration should involve some level of effort involved in understanding what is stored. Hence the “File Analysis” to remove Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (Referred to as ROT) information. In my experience with file share migrations… it’s not uncommon to find that 70-80% or more can be archived allowing you to focus on the key parts of the content.

Content Enrichment

The newest products from Microsoft really give us a lot to work with here with SharePoint Syntex with document understanding and electronic forms processing both providing classification extraction and AI models that can be used to apply to libraries enhancing our content with intelligent file storage capabilities. SharePoint Syntex provides enriched content types and columns populated by content from within the documents themselves. This allows a much improved user experience of grouping, filtering, sorting and loads of automation capabilities that come along with enriched content. Not only content extraction, but also information governance enhancements such as protecting, labeling, and applying content and applying policies for enforcement or disposition.

Intelligent Migration

Once you’ve classified your content you can move it to be better utilized in knowledge bases, content centers, or other departmental repositories based on content type. One quick example of migrating content is to gather letters, SOWs, Resumes, Invoices, and other contracts in their respective enhanced repositories which provide improved search and discovery. Some may find they have a lot of content that as well meets the criteria of archival or disposition to expire the content.

Automatically identify and Highlight topics

The newest product Viva Topics can be used to have AI to reason over your organization’s data and automatically identify, process, and organize content. It can recognize common topics across content and conversations, organize information, and generate topic pages. Discover and display complementary topics and expertise from across sources across the tools they use every day. Those topic pages can be the start to organizational like wikipedia of knowledge to help both new employees ramp up, but really connect the experts with the knowledge they are producing and provide centers of knowledge for all employees.

I’ve put together this illustration to help one understand the process and methodology for going from content to knowledge.

This infographic: intelligent content enrichment using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics is provided as creative commons share alike. Special thanks to Helux who contributed a lot to the process work on the graphic. You can see more about their intelligent content enrichment process and tools on their site at http://helux.ai

Chaos to Knowledge with SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva on March 10th from 2-3PM EST

Every company struggles with how to move from what many call the “Wild West” of content services. How can content and files be tamed? Join us as we show you how a systematic approach to discovery with File Analysis to remove redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) information in conjunction with a solid information architecture practice ensures a consistent and reliable content services program. Studies show that 30-40% of all content stored by businesses is considered ROT – understanding and managing this content before it moves to the Cloud is critical to an organization’s search and content services strategies.

Microsoft is leading the market in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enrich content with SharePoint Syntex and surface topics in the newly released Microsoft Viva. These new products provide a game-changing way for organizations to classify, extract and build document understanding into their content. For instance, SharePoint Syntex integration with AI Builder and Power Automate allows you to create and use AI Builder form processing models directly from your SharePoint document library, and to automate the processing of forms. The new Microsoft Viva product builds on the power of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning, and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best. What you can expect to learn:

• Best practices to achieve the Content Services goal of chaos to knowledge

• How to build Knowledge bases known as Content Centers with SharePoint Syntex

• How to empower knowledge workers with Microsoft Viva

• Understand the latest in Microsoft’s Knowledge Roadmap

Register below for the upcoming webinar where we will walk through these steps and help you understand how SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics fit in a comprehensive process methodology helping you formalize a more cohesive Enterprise Content Services Knowledge Strategy.

Join me in a this free 1 hour webinar on “Intelligent Content Enrichment Using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex and Viva Topics: Chaos to Knowledge with SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva” on March 10th from 2-3PM EST sponsored by Helux.

Live Webinar with Q&A:

March 10 at 11:00AM Pacific & 2PM Eastern

>> Register Now

Read more about SharePoint Syntex at http://aka.ms/SharePointSyntex

Read more about Viva Topics at http://aka.ms/VivaTopics