I first came across SharePoint on a short-term contract at a local engineering firm. It was back in the days just before the 2007 release, and the project I'd been brought in to support was in reaction to the firm's acquisition by a larger company. Our mandate was to centralize content storage and versioning methods. I was tasked with loading content into the SharePoint database, and applying enterprise metadata. It's a role that I'd like to talk up, but I'd be lying if I said it was anything more than data entry.
The work was administrative at best, but it did give be a brief introduction to the enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities of SharePoint. And it helped me land my permanent gig as a catch-all Technical Writer / Document Controller / SharePoint Administrator.
The Company—which is how I unceremoniously refer to my current employer—had been in a period of growth since 2001. They had become the consolidation of 19 regional, private companies, with 19 different styles of content, business practices, and operational procedures. And on top of the challenge of standardizing these things, The Company was also stretched out across 5 time zones in 2 countries.
Before I was brought in to manage the product, the IT team had proposed and been granted approval to set up SharePoint 2003 as a web-based file share. Using the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (free licence), we set up document libraries for each of The Company’s business units and identified content sponsors from within. These content sponsors were tasked with collecting all of their departmental documentation, processes, and procedures, and forwarding them to me for processing. They were also the people who gave me final approval on their respective content before it would be published to the file share.
For over two years, I had the responsibility of processing this content—a job that saw me templating documents, editing them for grammar and standardized terminology, and suggesting appropriate folder hierarchies within the appropriate document libraries. I worked with the content managers to create and modify this content as needed, and I made sure to touch every single piece of content before loading it to the file share libraries.
As the file share grew, references and links within documents also grew, and required more administration and control measures. So I also implemented these. I developed an extensive index that categorized and listed each piece of content within the file share, and identified each document reference that existed within. It was a laborious process, but given the tools at my disposal, it was as efficient and consistent as possible.
