Information architecture for document repositories

Question

Hi,

I've been tasked with re-designing the architecture of my division's document repositories. We currently have hundreds of documents across multiple SharePoint servers and would like to consolidate them under one repository that will allow users to easily find and update their docs.

Can you recommend any resources to help me in terms of best practices, case studies, tips, etc.

Any help will be extremely appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Findability is a good organising principal for your Information Architecture. (Bill English on sharePoint and findability)

Remember that different users prefer to search others like to browse using site navigation.

It is pretty much all about the users and how they are going to find and share thier docs and very little about the technical aspects of how SharePoint can organise information.

From the perspective of architecting a shared single SharePoint instance bare in mind that you don't want a particular Site Collection to grow more than 100Gig in size as the database infrastructure is going to be hard to manage. So plan for document storage growth and divide up fast growing document collections accordingly.