Improving Communication & Search in Knowledge Centers without a Taxonomy
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How to create a knowledge center in SharePoint 2010 without using a taxonomy and making search work, out of the box. Presentation from KMWorld 2014 in Washington, D.C. Be sure to click on the Notes link below the slide pane to see read my notes.
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Improving Communication & Search in Knowledge Centers without a Taxonomy
- 1. C205: Improving Communication & Search Knowledge Centers without a Taxonomy Robert Kocher – KM World 2014 November 6, 2014
- 3. What we needed PDFs Images Power Point Consistency Findability Usage Info Excel Files
- 4. Making search work Knowledge Center SearchNormal SharePoint Search • Deliberate with our url (page names) • Used the title field (available in SharePoint Enterprise Wiki site templates) • Created a descriptive paragraph at top of each page about the page content • Create a Description column/metadata field for customized search results
- 5. Making search work Metadata Navigation ResultsMetadata Navigation For Content Creators • Created a prefix for our page names (RO_PP_AS_pagename) • Added metadata for metadata navigation • Created views, including a datasheet view for mass updating
- 6. Home/Index pages Original Knowledge base • Provide home pages which allow for navigation New Knowledge Center
- 7. Consistent pages • CSS is your friend! o Allows you to style parts of your page o Allows you to sync the ribbon with correct tags • Break up existing documents, when possible o Overviews o Procedures o Key terms • Use anchor tags for longer pages h1 tag h3 tag
- 8. Recent content changes All updates • Created a view of all recent changes • Created a link of recent changes by each process using the metadata navigation feature • Link button placed on all home pages Process specific updates
- 10. Content change requests and feedback Feedback Form • Created a new, simplified process for requesting changes o More accountability for approvers • Created and promoted an easy feedback loop o Important to respond quickly to feedback Change Request
- 11. Measuring Results • Review site collection web analytics o Daily Unique visitors o Top pages and visitors o Number of queries o Top queries o Failed queries — Term or phrase — Percentage abandoned
- 13. Top pages Total page views during this time period: 1,508,099
- 15. Failed queries Zero click-throughs One click-through Query term is an abbreviation. Review failed queries to determine if synonyms or acronyms need to be added.
- 16. Contact and useful links Contact information: Email: rkocher@vanguard.com Twitter: @Robert_Kocher LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/rob-kocher/12/750/541/ Links: Sue Hanley’s 10 Essential SharePoint Search Hints Enterprise Wiki vs. Wiki Page Library SharePoint 2010 Search: Relevancy Algorithms Relevancy 301 – The Graduate Level Course
Editor's Notes
- Information is everywhere Either there is no search capability or it doesn’t work, so we navigate to content No user or usage information to determine content relevance We don’t know who to contact when discrepancies are found in the information Adding functionality to the information database requires IT involvement
- How can we make search work? How will we handle content changes and associated approvals? What usage/user information can we gather to make improvements? How do we handle page consistency?
- In SharePoint, to make search work without a taxonomy you need to look under the covers a little. SharePoint’s search engine considers these items in determining relevancy and ranking of search results. Listed in order of importance: URL – URL must have separation of text (either with underscores, spaces or dashes) so that the search engine can read the words Title – In an Enterprise wiki site, this is an out of the box field. You can use this for spelling out acronyms and/or for synonyms. HTML – Use of an ‘h1’ tag for the actual title on the page (not the title field). Body text – the text on the page. Text inside of a web part is not crawled by the search engine. The descriptive paragraph helps the reader. They can quickly assess if this is the right content they were looking for. Unfortunately, this paragraph is not part of the search results page. Your Central Admin. Administrator can customize the search results page by reconfiguring the XML file to use the description metadata field and creating a customized search page.
- Some key notes: Use an Enterprise Wiki site template (vs. a wiki page library) This provides the page rating to display directly on each page created Make sure that the wiki page is the default page template Activate the publishing feature You will not see any pages in search until AFTER you publish the page AND a full crawl is completed Our site was Read Only by the users, which is not a true wiki, but this was gold copy content. With that said, there was a need to use the following tools: Created a prefix content creators and administrators to quickly navigate to pages within the Pages library Assisted in making sure that our pages were tagged correctly Started off with some general metadata tags, such as process and page type, allowing us to quickly find several, similar pages if we needed to compare them, or copy/paste to create a new one, using the same formatting. One thing I love about SharePoint is the ability to display your content in so many different ways. By using a datasheet view, similar to a spreadsheet, you could perform mass updating. This helps if you need to quickly update tags on several pages all at once. One caveat, however, is that you will need to republish every page in which you updated the metatags (if it has already been published).
- Not only do the new home/index pages (Knowledge Center) allow for navigation, but you can see all of the information in each section on one page. If you can’t find it quickly, search is always available.
- In our case, we had to add the css to each page, however, you can have your page designed with the css built in. How do you do it? Add the css file to your Shared Documents (or other) library. Right-click on it and select “copy shortcut.” Go to your newly created page and press enter once or twice (this is important!) Use your up arrow to go back to the top of the page – DO NOT BACKSPACE From the ribbon, select Insert > Web Part > Media > Content Editor Web Part, then click OK. Edit the web part. Make sure that you are inside the web part and not the body of the page. (see next step to determine if you are in the right place). From the ribbon, select HTML (right-side) > Edit HTML Source (if HTML already exists, then you are not in the web part. This should be completely blank). Add the following code: <link href="/sites/sitename/Shared%20Documents/filename.css" rel="stylesheet"/><style> #s4-leftpanel { DISPLAY: none } .s4-ca { MARGIN-LEFT: 0px }</style> This code: Applies the styling of the CSS file saved in the shared documents library (modifies the h1, h2 and h3 tags) Hides the left-hand navigation Adds a small border to the left-side of the page You can add additional formatting if you have images with links. The formatting would remove the border around images with links. Once you have completed this step, save your HTML and click OK to get out of the web part. Now you are ready to add content to your page. Click BELOW the web part, then begin adding your page content. Personally, I prefer to enter content in the HTML editor instead of on the page. I can be sure that the HTML stays clean and not all of the Microsoft rich text (ms-rte…) code gets added to everything We have some css specific to the “TA” box, which visually represents regulated or non-regulated content to the information consumers. Our goal is to use a different abbreviation and color scheme for different document types. This approach gave us a nice clean and consistent feel to our content pages. We also broke up some of our longer content pages which included several different pieces, such as overviews, procedures and key terms all in one document. This was too much information for users to digest anyway. The single document is now multiple documents but they are all linked together. When we had larger pages, we used anchor tags and tried to break the page into sections. This was all once procedure, but had multiple parts to it. The user may have gotten stuck on a specific part of the process and could jump right to that section.
- One of the challenges we ran into was differentiating between the pages we just created vs. those that had actual content changes. We just added another yes/no metadata field/column with radio buttons. This was the tag we needed to filter the view by content that was recently requested to be modified. This gave us a view of all the recent changes, but we still wanted to break changes out by process. Using the metadata navigation filter on this view, we were able to quickly get the url/link for each process. We then put the link on the home page of each process.
- Just a view of the buttons on the home/index pages.
- We kept these forms very simple to make it easy for users to quickly provide the necessary details. With the change requests, we used content types on a task list. This deterred submitters of content changes from getting caught up in the necessary administration to complete the requests. By using a task list in SharePoint, an automatic email is sent to a person who becomes the assignee of the request. Once the request is submitted, you now have a time/date stamp so the clock starts ticking. This helps with accountability for getting requests turned around faster. With the feedback forms, we set up an alert on this list for the group responsible for taking action on the feedback. We have been able to respond with in minutes as opposed to hours, or even days. A huge win in gaining confidence from our users. Note that because our site was Read Only, we actually house the forms on a different SP site. There is some javascript which can be used to open a link to a form and once you finish the form, the dialogue box closes and you are returned back to the site and not the request form list.
- Taking a look at site metrics Important Note: Navigate Site Actions > Site Settings and in the Site Actions section, select Site Collection Web Analytics (not Site Web Analytics – you will not see search metrics) Daily unique visitors provides strong analytics to the number of users you have, day to day. Without other analytic tools, you cannot get the full details of your users, but this is helpful. Top pages and visitors provides a great look into what the most important pages are and who are your top users. You can use this information to reach out to these folks to assist with future testing, being advocates, or requesting feedback. Number of queries – pretty simple, but it is important to look at the curve over time to see if your users are using search more frequently. It shows confidence in the searching capabilities, otherwise, they would be navigating their way every day.
- We initially rolled out about 600 pages of content on 12/5/2013. In February, 2014, we rolled out another 500 pages of content. Our final phase of another 500 pages was roled out in May 2014. These additional pages is why our daily users jumped from about 300 users per day to 400, however, since May, we continue to add users. We feel that we have additional adopters since search is working and the site is clean.
- Here are the top pages. Our index pages are VERY popular. We can see that people are sill navigating, but that is fine. Good practice is to provide search and navigation.
- Our daily queries has gone up by double digits over the last six months. We haven’t added content, however, searching is becoming more of a habit for our users. We are seeing an average of about 2 searches per user which is a tremendous accomplishment. We did not compare the page views over this time frame, but our assumptions are that more page views are also happening. To get click-through information, you will need a separate software application.
- If percentage abandoned equals 100%, this indicates that there were no click throughs In the example, row two shows an abandoned rate of 66.67%. Out of three searches, only one click through occurred. On line 8, f11 provide no items in the search results. This page gave us information about users searching for “international” and no search results were coming up. Confused, I asked a content expert and she stated that we used the word Foreign on the documents. We went ahead and updated the title to include both Foreign and International words, resolving the search issue. We also communicated with the users to continue searching for International, if the desired.