How Successful Companies Sustain Innovation

Innovation is widely regarded as the single most important ingredient in today’s economy. But innovation as a destination isn’t enough.

Sustained innovation is a high-productivity state in which an organization to innovate in all aspects of its business, including management, divisions, operations, customers and suppliers. It requires a seamless, structured management approach that begins with board- and CEO-level leadership and connects all the way through technology investment and implementation. Above all, sustained innovation is a journey, not a destination. The enterprise doesn’t stop innovating after attaining one goal; it’s engaged in a continual process of reinvention, invention and discovery.

Consider the following three examples:

• One Hit Wonder: The smartphone market is red hot, with Apple and Samsung engaged in the most fierce race for dominance via product innovation. But let’s not forget the once ubiquitous handheld of choice for most employers and business people: the BlackBerry. A mere five years ago, Research In Motion was one of the most celebrated technology companies in the world, as the BlackBerry, or “CrackBerry” as it became known, led the smartphone market. But the meteoric rise of the iPhone and Android devices has made R.I.M. and its big innovation a relic in a world of constant reinvention.

• Rising from Failure: In 1919, Cornelius Vander Starr was the first westerner to sell insurance to the Chinese, and he did so successfully until Communism drove him and American International Group back to the U.S. in 1949. AIG quickly grew it business globally, and in 1962 Starr gave management of the company's slowing U.S. holdings to Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg, who revitalized the company by moving from personal insurance to high-margin corporate coverage and selling through independent brokers rather than agents to slash those salaries. The company went public in 1969 and continued to thrive until 2005, when AIG became the high-profile subject of fraud investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Justice Department and New York State Attorney General's Office. Greenberg was booted amid an accounting scandal in February 2005 and the company was battered by a liquidity crisis when its credit ratings were downgraded below "AA" levels in September 2008. Thanks to government bailouts in 2008 and 2009, AIG has bounced back and regained its status as a vital American multinational corporate titan. AIG isn’t taking its rescue for granted. The insurer unveiled a new corporate logo as part of a major rebranding overhaul aimed at its continued growth and success.

• On-going Success: Pfizer, the world's biggest pharmaceutical company by revenues, constantly develops blockbuster medicines and vaccines with household names like Zithromax, Lipitor and Viagra. Founded in 1849 as a manufacturer of fine chemicals, Pfizer's discovery of Terramycin a year later launched its successful and ongoing expansion into a research-based pharmaceutical company. The drug maker has augmented its research by building its brands, pipeline and profile through a series of major acquisitions. The company continues to lead the market with treatments for myriad maladies. Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Pfizer’s Bosulif, which treats a rare type of leukemia that usually affects older adults.

3 Principles for Sustained Innovation

Sustained innovation is powered by people who come together to share ideas, compare observations and brainstorm solutions to complex problems. Enterprises with a strong focus on sustained innovation share three common principles that act as the glue binding people together in productive collaboration. They are:

1. Converged disciplines: Ideas aren’t isolated; they’re celebrated in groups that enable the entire organization to act as one entity. Of particular importance is the convergence of business and technology management to ensure that no one unit or division is missing the opportunity to capitalize on new ideas and possibilities.

2. Cross-boundary collaboration: No enterprise operates in a vacuum. Every manager, employee and contractor potentially has a piece of the puzzle to create a new breakthrough business opportunity. Suppliers, partners, distributors, and customers are an equally valuable source of information and ideas.

3. Innovative business structure: Not every organization can empower an unstructured development culture like the Lunatic Fringe who led innovation at ground-breaking tech pioneer Texas Instruments; most require structure that compels convergence of disciplines, management and operational units.

To bring these principles to life, enterprises operating with sustained innovation focus on three distinct, intimately related practices that require business/technology/management convergence to perform at a high level of organizational maturity.

Sustain Innovation Playbook

Designing and operating organizations capable of sustained innovation requires a playbook that demands a systemic process constructed around the following core steps:

• Listen broadly for ideas through vision, innovation and external networks. Listen to the customer. Listen to the front lines in your organization.
• Understand who your actual and potential customers are, what they want and need, what they will need and why those needs have not yet been met.
• Organize the innovation team to include those with a stake in the innovation, organize the innovation program and organize the resources and investments needed to address the problem.
• Create an environment and capability for innovation by giving the team the ability to fail. Create many alternative solutions by leveraging the cascaded innovation lifecycle.
• Experiment and learn from failure. Conduct many experiments in parallel, using prototyping and other iterative, feedback-driven techniques.
• Listen again to the customer to help them imagine. Use prototypes to elicit feedback. Listen to customer acceptance/buying criteria. Listen to what could go wrong, but don’t let the devil’s advocate take control.
• Design the concepts to address customer-centric values, such as cost, intuitive use, ease of change and sense of enhancement.
• Implement the final go/no-go decision. Consolidate or eliminate competing alternatives to a manageable number. Send concepts back for reinvention, retesting or redesign. Implement the second stage of the innovation lifecycle: manifestation.

Get out of the Garage

Sure, some people work better alone. But most people are more prolific as part of a team or extended community of ideas and talents that fosters some of the world’s most important inventions. Garage inventors can’t possibly compete with myriad breakthroughs born from sustained, systemic innovation. The first single chip microprocessor publicly introduced by Intel in 1971, the first car safety air bags offered in the 1973 model Chevrolet and the depression game changer drug Prozac in 1988, are all considered great innovations developed and perfected by teams, not individuals. Even Oppenheimer needed the Manhattan Project team to create the atomic bomb. The true test of sustained innovation isn’t the invention itself, but the ultimate and ongoing benefit produced by the innovation for the business.

Discipline and innovation are not opposites, but complements. Establishing an innovation culture consumes a great deal of organizational energy in overcoming the forces of inertia and entropy. But once an idea has been successfully commercialized, respected champions emerge to drive new sources of the energy, creativity, discipline and resources that sustain and grow an enduring culture of innovation. Successful organizations manage innovation from concept to commercialization so that good ideas not only get created, but also continually find their way into the products and services portfolio.

--Faisal Hoque is founder, chairman, and CEO at BTM Corporation and founder of research think-tank BTM Institute. His newest book is [i]The Power of Convergence. Follow him on twitter @faisal_hoque.
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Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Six Core Digital Workplace Capabilities: Designing with the Workforce in Mind

There has been much buzz lately about the results from a study by McKinsey Global Institute, which estimated that knowledge worker productivity could potentially be increased with 20-25 percent with use of social technologies. Whether or not these figures are realistic or not, they point to the great potential for improving knowledge work and how social technologies can play a key role in unlocking that potential.

It's clear that to realize even a tiny bit of the potential hinted at in the study, we cannot continue being blinded by technology, putting technology first and people second. The failure of technology-centric approaches was recently illustrated by the findings of the 4th annual IT Adoption Insight Report produced by Oracle UPK together with Neochange. The study found that technology-centric organizations spend 2 to 3 times as much money on technology than organizations taking a more user-centric approach, yet the latter proved to be more profitable, indicating there is substantial ROI in becoming more user-centric.

The failure of the technology-centric approach to improving knowledge work is a major reason why new concepts such as “Digital Workplace” have a reason for existence. The Digital Workplace encourages us to take a more holistic approach when designing the digital work environment for an organization’s workforce. Rather than focusing on the individual solutions and tools such as intranet sites, collaboration tools, communication tools and productivity tools, we need to start with identifying the needs of the organization and its people and take a holistic approach to designing their digital workplace.

Questions such as “Should we replace our intranet with a social networking platform” are totally irrelevant and symptoms of technology-centric thinking that will be a sure path to failure. What we should think about instead is what capabilities a digital workplace needs to provide the organization and the people it should serve. These capabilities should be made available to people as services, designed to fit different usage situations, enabling them to get things done in the most efficient and effective way (see illustration below).

      

In this article I will highlight and take a closer look at six capabilities that should be the core of the digital workplace for many organizations.

1. Coordinating

Workspace awareness is about our ability to monitor and keep track of what’s happening at work: who is doing what, who is interacting with whom, whose turn it is to contribute, and so on. Having workspace awareness is essential if you are to coordinate your work with other people’s work.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that creating workspace awareness, and thus coordinating work, becomes a challenge in a distributed and complex work environment. At the same time, the need for effective coordination among different teams becomes increasingly important as the interdependencies between teams as well as the pace of change increase.

The problem is that many current digital work environments primarily have been designed for personal productivity, focusing on supporting individual tasks and less on the coordination of tasks and fundamentals such as creating workspace awareness. Ironically this has contributed to making people less productive and feeling isolated and disengaged.

What is lacking in most digital work environments is a really intelligent system that helps people quickly build workspace awareness and makes work visible. To help individuals and teams create workspace awareness that simplifies coordination, awareness tools such as activity streams can be introduced. Besides signaling to people so they know when it is their time to contribute, an activity stream can help them discover relevant information and external dependencies that they need to be aware off.

In other words, an activity stream can help to reduce workplace uncertainty so that people can make the required decisions and take action. Activity streams can also help to decrease workplace isolation. In a large and dispersed workforce, awareness tools can help bring people closer to each other and make them feel less isolated.

2. Finding People

"At the very least, our systems should help us find each other"

— Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText

Finding the right people is one of the most common needs in organizations and sometimes a very difficult task in a big organization. The bigger and more distributed an organization gets, the harder it is to know who is working for the same organization, what they know and what, how and where they could contribute.

The first step in getting to know someone and building a relationship is to be aware about that person's existence. This makes discovery tools important. If our systems can help us discover other people we could benefit from knowing about, maybe because they share a common interest with us or possess a skill that we might be in need of, chances are we will get much better at matching the right person for the right job. Doing so is a key to success in a business. Otherwise they might be wasting their talent and skills on something they are not suited for, and you might miss out on having person on your project that could be the difference between your team's success and failure.

Rich profiles are necessary components in solutions for finding and discovering people. Rich profiles give employees the ability to create an online presentation of themselves and their skills, interests, education, memberships and so forth. At the very least, a rich profile should include a photo of each employee.

The importance of a simple thing like adding a photo of yourself so that colleagues who don’t know you can put a face to your name cannot be stressed enough. For one thing, the photo will make it easier to remember your name and seeing the individual behind the name. You will become familiar to them, making it easier for you to have textual conversations.

3. Networking

In their research paper “Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks,” Aral, Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne showed that people's social networks are very important to the information system in an organization as their networks “strongly influence information diffusion … and access to novel information.”

Information diffusion in organizations follows the structure of our relationships with each other, and having access to the right tools for building and maintaining relationships as well as for disseminating information through our social networks can have significant impact on the effectiveness of an organization’s information system.

An MIT study from 2009 by A. Pentland (pdf) showed that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7 percent more productive than their colleagues. Another study from 2009, sponsored by NEHRA and Partnering Resources, set out to answer the question of whether or not networking actually makes a difference for the success or failure of change initiatives. The study found that 73 percent of the least successful change initiatives were led by people described as having moderate or weak personal networks, and that 93 percent of the successful change initiatives were led by leaders with strong or very strong personal networks.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Want More Productive Workers? Adjust Your Thermostat

If your office is a meat locker in the summer and a sauna in the winter, your employees' productivity and collaboration suffer--probably more than you think.

Some years back, the Campbell Soup Company stumbled upon a marketing insight worthy of Don Draper.

If you want to predict when people will buy soup, the reasoning goes, you have to look beyond the product. It’s not about the depth of the soup’s flavor, the color of its packaging, or even its price. In fact, it’s hardly about Campbell’s at all.

It’s about the weather.

Consumers buy more soup when conditions are cold, damp, or windy. The question facing Campbell’s was this: How do you leverage this information into sales?

So they did something brilliant. They linked the frequency of their radio buys to the weather of each station. To determine when ads would be purchased, they developed an algorithm called the “Misery Index,” which uses meteorological data to track weather patterns. To this day, if you’re hearing an ad for soup on the radio, there’s a good chance you’re either carrying an umbrella or wearing a coat.

The rationale behind Campbell’s Misery Index is simultaneously clever and obvious, a hallmark of game-changing ideas. But it also raises an interesting question.

If a drop in temperature changes what we buy, what does it do to the way we think?

Typing With Gloves

If you sit near a vent, share legroom with a space heater, or use your desk to store outerwear, the question warrants serious consideration. One of the painful ironies of office life is that we can never quite get the temperature right. We spend our summers shivering in meat lockers and our winters sweating in saunas.

Central air hasn’t made us comfortable, so much as made us uncomfortable in a different way.

The experience isn’t simply unpleasant. It comes with a real financial cost.

To find out just how much, Cornell University researchers conducted a study that involved tinkering with the thermostat of an insurance office. When temperatures were low (68 degrees, to be precise), employees committed 44% more errors and were less than half as productive as when temperatures were warm (a cozy 77 degrees).

Cold employees weren’t just uncomfortable, they were distracted. The drop in performance was costing employers 10% more per hour, per employee. Which makes sense. When our body’s temperature drops, we expend energy keeping ourselves warm, making less energy available for concentration, inspiration, and insight.

Feeling Cold? You Might Just Be Lonely

And it’s not just performance that dips. It’s our impression of the people around us. In a fascinating study reported in the prestigious journal Science, psychologists uncovered a link between physical and interpersonal warmth. When people feel cold physically, they’re also more likely to perceive others as less generous and caring.

In a word, they view them as cold.

When we’re warm, on the other hand, we let our guard down and view ourselves as more similar to those around us. A forthcoming paper from researchers at UCLA even shows that brief exposure to warmer temperatures leads people to report higher job satisfaction.

Why the link between physical and mental warmth?

Psychologists argue it has to do with the way we’re built. The same area of the brain that lights up when we sense temperature--the insular cortex--is also active when we feel trust and empathy toward another person. When we experience warmth, we experience trust. And vice versa.

Neurologically, it seems we have our wires crossed. Except it’s not a coincidence.

There’s a reason we associate warmth with trust, and it’s because doing so promotes our survival, especially early on. As infants, keeping close to our caretaker is vital to staying alive, which is one reason we’re programmed to seek out warmth. Throughout our lives, we associate warmth (a hug) with affection (this person loves me). It’s a connection that grows stronger with every intimate embrace.

Why Lonely People Take More Showers

Because our minds unconsciously link warmth with affection, we’re more sensitive to cold temperatures than we think.

Research shows that when we experience cold temperatures, we’re especially likely to feel isolated. In fact, countering the experience of isolation is one reason people spend more time in the shower when they’re feeling down.

The unconscious desire for physical warmth is thought to be the reason lonely people bathe longer, more frequently, and use higher temperatures.

The Warmth-Productivity Link

We know that cold temperatures worsen productivity. What new research is showing is that it can also corrode the quality of our relationships.

And this, ultimately, is why office temperature matters.

Great workplaces aren’t simply the product of good organizational policies. They emerge when employees connect with one another and form meaningful relationships that engender trust. What’s often overlooked is that connections don’t operate in a vacuum.

It seems obvious that the temperature of a restaurant or theater can alter our experience. So why do we continue to neglect it in the workplace?

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

WebDAM Adds PowerPoint, Batch Downloading Features

Digital asset management (DAM) provider WebDAM Solutions is launching new features that are designed to increase efficiency and streamline productivity.

One set of features revolve around the use of PowerPoint file assets. Users can now centralize, control, catalog, share and play their PowerPoint presentations within WebDAM, from any connected device.

Preset Downloading

Other new PowerPoint management features include in-page viewing, full screen viewing inside WebDAM, thumbnail previews for navigation within a PowerPoint presentation, a high-quality HTML 5 viewer and iPad/iPhone compatibility.

Ron Selvey, WebDAM Director of Marketing, said in a statement that he found the new PowerPoint management functions to be “one of the most exciting” new features, because it’s essential for him “to be able to quickly find, repurpose, and share presentation assets.”

The enhancements also include the ability to individually download or batch download digital assets in the desired format, with WebDAM handling the conversion. Supported file formats include jpeg, png, tiff, eps, bmp, gif and pdf.

Users select the format, resolution, dimensions and color space prior to downloading, and download settings can be configured each time or fixed, in order to standardize around formats and other parameters. An administrator can label fixed download presets such as print, website or email.

Extending DAM

The PowerPoint addition is only the most recent in a series of functions that WebDAM has been adding to extend the definition of what a digital asset management system can provide.

In July, for instance, the company added collaboration features that could be useful when crunching under deadlines. Those features, based around email notifications and alerts, provide everyone in a designated team with the status of the assets in question. Updates are sent when those assets are modified in a specified way.

Those modifications include assets being commented on, uploaded or downloaded, deleted, moved or edited. Notifications and alerts can be tied to actions performed on specific assets, and users can see any edits or changes that have been made.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

What Successful Night Owls Get Done Before Bed

We all know morning people are said to have a business advantage, but what about those night owls? They've got a competitive edge, too. Here are their productivity tips for the wee hours.

Early birds get all the credit. Research indicates that morning people tend to be more active and goal oriented, and such larks as Steve Jobs, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, and 25-year old David Karp, founder of the Tumblr blogging platform suggest that climbing the ladder of success is easier before breakfast.

So does that mean night owls are at a disadvantage? Research by Satoshi Kanazawa and colleagues at the London School of Economics and Political Science suggests no. The group discovered significant differences in sleep preferences and found that . They found an evolutionary shift from being active in the day towards nightly pursuits and that those individuals who preferred to stay up late demonstrated "a higher level of cognitive complexity.” Researchers from Belgium and Switzerland studying sleep habits found that early risers needed more rest than their nocturnal counterparts and didn’t focus as well later in the day as those who slept in.

Armed with that knowledge, Fast Company found a group of dedicated night owls to discuss their strategies for making the wee hours work for them. Most responded to our queries via email well past midnight. Here’s what they told us.

Pick One Project

Keval Desai, managing partner of InterWest Partners and a former Google developer, says he’s only seen the sun rise in the past decade when he pulls an all-nighter. He replied at 2:22 a.m., close to his typical turn-in time of 2 a.m.

His penchant for working late was born of necessity when he was still in high school in Bombay. “My parents and I lived in a small apartment and during the day there was no privacy of time or space to concentrate. So the only option to get my studies done would be to work on it at night after everyone was asleep and there were no friends, neighbors, or random visitors dropping by.”

Staying up late is now a habit, and Desai says it’s common for him to leave the thinking work for the wee hours. “During the day most of my time is spent in meetings with entrepreneurs, and the only time I can find alone to do work that requires some concentration is when the rest of the household is asleep.”

He’ll pick one project per night. Daytime is for doing the research on tasks that “require synthesizing several different pieces of information, then applying some thought on key decisions that need to be made and then articulating those decisions,” he says. “I don’t go to sleep until the task is done in one night session.”

You’ll find Desai working from home after hours, although he says he’s logged plenty of nights at the Google offices and then drives home to San Francisco, 45 miles away. He’s a big believer in drinking a cup or two of decaf green or chamomile tea while ensconced in a spare bed with his laptop.

Combat Clutter

Laurie Tucker is the senior vice president for corporate marketing at FedEx who sent her response to us at 1:45 a.m., also close to her bedtime of 2 am.

Tucker, who rises at 6 a.m. most mornings to work out, is one of those (rare) individuals who only needs about five hours of sleep each night. “My mother only slept a few hours a night, and I can still remember visits from my cousins who were put to bed by their parents at 8 p.m., while my brother and I sat up until midnight watching TV with the grownups,” she says. Though her husband “loves to sleep” and hits the hay at about 9:30 p.m., Tucker has to make herself go to bed.

“I adore late night. When my kids were young, I loved having hours of quiet after they went to bed. I had team all over the world back then so I would do conference calls, respond to email, and catch up on reading,” she says. Now that her kids are grown and she manages a U.S.-based team, she has more time to read and think.  “I love the quiet time to unclutter my mind.”

While she doesn't require as much sleep as most people, Tucker still believes late-night hours should be spent at rest. "Nighttime is for regeneration. Be at peace, feed your mind, and let your body rest.” 

She avoids anything with caffeine at night, says that she goes to sleep within minutes of her head hitting the pillow. Her energy level stays high all day, and she never naps. "My biggest challenge is to stay away from the kitchen--dinner to bedtime is a long stretch," says Tucker.

Hit The “Idea” Bar

Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief of and author of the new book I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This, Kate White was kind enough to spill some of her late-night strategies.

White goes to bed earlier than she used to (midnight or 1 a.m.) because she hits the ground running at 5:30 a.m. to work on her fiction. At night, you’ll find her hard at work on magazine editing, non-fiction book writing, and blogs.

“My craziest trick is that I regularly do my work standing up at a rolling butcher block counter in my kitchen. If I were to work sitting down, I’d fall asleep," White says. "I know it sounds awful, but I think of it as if I’m tending bar in the evening--a bar of ideas. And I always keep the kitchen TV on so it doesn’t seem too lonely. I drink several espressos at night, which really helps."

Late Night Rendezvous

CEO of the online meeting platform Groopt, Patrick Allen says his head doesn’t hit the pillow (or his desk) until about 3:30 a.m. That makes him the early bird among the site’s developer staff, who tend to stay up all night chatting on Campfire.

Located on the top floor or a quirky Victorian in San Francisco’s fabled Haight Ashbury neighborhood, Allen says the Groopt HQ is a haven for productivity, with feng shui that would make Confucius proud. “We firmly believe that to reach maximum productivity, you must work in the optimum environment, and this couldn't be more true for the night owl,” he says. Rather than revel in the quiet, Allen says it's not uncommon to find “three to five of our Troopers sitting around the coffee table at 3 a.m. hammering out user stories or crafting new experiments for cohort analysis,” which energizes him.

To be effective late, he says, you need to believe what you're doing is giving you an edge on the competition. "As Childish Gambino says, ‘While they be sleeping I'll be on to that new $hit.’"

To keep alert, they've stocked their pantry with fresh coffee, a Nespresso machine, and "mounds and mounds of Yerba Mate.”

Big Picture Thinking

Frank Aldorf, the chief brand officer of Specialized Bicycle Components sent us a reply at 1:49 a.m.--late for the guy who tries to turn in no later than half past midnight.

“It's actually fun working on this brand,” says Aldorf. But with a team in different time zones and a company that has offices in 28 countries, Aldorf’s day is mostly organized around meetings and connecting with people or travel.

“At night is the time when I get stuff done and can think about the bigger picture. It's focused. That’s the time when I can turn notes and ideas drafted on the fly into concepts and future projects. I read through saved articles and get inspired by my well-maintained RSS feed.”

Aldorf says he needs the right music on his headphones. “I can't live or travel anymore without my noise-canceling headphones and a station like KCRW.”

Aldorf doesn’t do caffeine at night and keeps the coffee consumption to 1 or 2 espressos a day. “Before I start my nightshift, I go for a short bike ride to sharpen my senses,” he adds, “But I know how important rest time is to be game the next day.” Which for him, starts back up at 6:30 a.m. 

What keeps you up at night? How do you stay productive? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Lydia Dishman used to stay up writing until 2 a.m. Now she's switched to waking up early, albeit with a LOT of coffee. You can read more of her work here.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

The Path from Fileshare to SharePoint

One of the major complaints about SharePoint is that, while it contains the potential for expanded business productivity and automation, within many organizations it has become yet another file share. 

While that may be true, the primary difference is that, unlike those old file shares, SharePoint has the potential to be expanded upon. It is the sleeping giant in the organization. And funny enough, one of the major trends these days is movement of old network file shares and their vast volumes of unstructured data into SharePoint.

Let's examine why this shift is happening. For one, the adoption lifecycle for SharePoint as a platform is maturing, with over 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies either owning 2010 or planning to move to 2010. SharePoint adds many benefits that file shares just can’t provide, including retention policies, taxonomy and metadata, business productivity through workflow and forms, and robust document editing and versioning capability, to name a few.

The number one reason organizations delay their file share migration to SharePoint is fear of the unknown — they simply don't know where to start.

Understanding the Options

According to my colleague Mark McGovern, the logical place to begin the planning process of moving network file shares to SharePoint is to do an inventory, and determine which types of file shares are appropriate to migrate and which are not:

Some questions to ask during this process are: What is the volume of content to be moved? How often is it accessed? Does it need to be retained for a set period due to compliance reasons? Are the documents highly collaborative? Lots of small documents that are modified frequently and need to be retained for a given period would be a great candidate for migration. It is usually a combination of factors that determines the decision."

The next place that many organizations get "stuck" is in deciding the method for the migration. Depending on the skillset on hand, the timeframe in which to move the content or the complexity of content (multiple versions, historical metadata or maybe just the sheer volume of content), administrators can attempt to do it manually, they can engage their developers to write some custom code or use PowerShell scripts, or they can purchase one of many 3rd party tools on the market that support the SharePoint environment.

As Mark points out, the answer to that question — as with all difficult decisions in the SharePoint world — is that "It depends."

Mark adds,

There are pros and cons of each method. For example, when uploading files manually, the CreatedBy, CreatedDate, ModifedBy and ModifiedDate are not maintained. For legal reasons, this loss of historical metadata may rule out this method. Fortunately, there are tools on the market that can retain this important metadata."

Migration Considerations

Most file shares have become a dumping ground for content. While there may be valuable content within your system, it is likely you also have massive amounts of duplicate, outdated and unnecessary content that should be purged from your system. As you prepare to move this content, some questions you should ask include:

• Do you know what content is out there?
• Do you know who owns the content, and whether it even needs to be moved? (maybe it can remain, but indexed and therefore searchable)
• Is the folder structure important?
• Do you need to maintain historic metadata?
• Is the plan to move the content as-is and decommission your hardware, or will you attempt to organize/clean up the content prior to your migration?
• Will some content remain on the old system? (it might be tied to other internal tools that are not yet ready to move to SharePoint, or may never move to SharePoint)
• Are you planning to apply metadata and taxonomy? (using the existing folder structure, or creating a new taxonomy)
• Are users driving the clean up and tagging process, or is it an administrative effort?

Whatever method you decide to employ, the single most important aspect of migrating file share content to SharePoint is the metadata applied. As much as possible, make sure that you tag your documents with metadata during the migration, as applying metadata later can be labor-intensive, and you may introduce a greater potential for human error (you miss some of the content, don't apply new metadata or content types everywhere). Adding metadata tags during the migration makes your content more “findable” and easier to surface through search or through SharePoint's social capabilities.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com