The client:  Clustered storage solution company

The challenge:
This company's sales organization wanted to move its primary sales content from several disparate locations into a SharePoint / MOSS offering. Prior to SharePoint / MOSS, content was stored in many decentralized locations. Product brochures, case studies, sales tools, were stored on file shares. Key regional reference information was stored in SalesForce.com and could only be found there. Weekly sales team webcasts and training sessions were placed on a web page that was hard to administer and confusing for users to find information. FAQ, training, and "good-to-know" information was maintained on a Wikipedia-type sites, that required constant updating and management.

The solution:
The goal, migrate content from the four (4) following disparate data stores into one SharePoint / MOSS solution: HTML Web Page, File Shares / FTP Locations, SalesForce.com Reference database, Wikipedia- type community page. First, the content from the HTML pages and file shares were moved into document libraries. The main objective was to have all files stored in one central document library, and then use careful metadata tagging to sort the files and also ensure they appeared in the correct Webparts and eventual search results. Analysis and planning was critical in this area. Careful time was taken to catalog all of the content that was carelessly placed on the file shares and HTML pages. Critical information, such as upload / publish dates and also content type categories such as industry / vertical, regions, and localization info needed to be mapped out. Only after the metadata had been determined was the document library created and files effectively tagged and moved over. Links lists were used to highlight useful "sales tools" that the sales manager saw appropriate at that time, to info that would be very simple for the manager to administer. The SalesForce.com reference database info was moved over to SharePoint / MOSS as an Access file and presented via a filtered web part. Events lists (calendar) and webparts would be used to post key events for the sales force to be aware of. A Workflow process for new file uploads and content changes were created also.

The result:
With effective metadata the lists and libraries and search features were up and running and returning results as expected.