Engage with people in your organization who have expertise in content or records management. They can help you get your content audit off to a good start.
2. Start with IT
To get started, reach out to your IT team, who can provide you with inventory reports on the content you wish to audit. They may choose to use some of the standard Microsoft reports, or you may need them to create PowerShell or reporting scripts or make use of an inventory tool like AvePoint Fly Server to get the details you want.
Pro tip
Always ensure that these reports are run by someone with the proper administrative permissions; otherwise, you might miss content where unique permissions have been applied.
The reports should tell you the structure of what you currently have. For SharePoint, this includes:
Reports showing number and names of sites and subsites, potential owners and audiences based on the existing permissions, measures of usage and activity
Reports showing the number and names of pages in each site, the number and names of the documents in each of the document libraries, and created by and last modified details
Details on any lists being used in the site
Reports on which web parts could be successfully modernized and which will no longer be supported (if you’re moving from classic to modern SharePoint and need to modernize pages)
Reports of existing and inflight workflows, where you may have these in place
3. Look at the big picture first and work your way down
Audits should be done for the broadest level of content organizational structures – for SharePoint that's usually at the site level – and then as needed for more granularity. If you can make decisions about all the content contained in a site (or at least some large subset of it) together, you’ll save yourself and your content owners a lot of effort.
Sites or content that haven’t been updated recently or accessed regularly may be targets for deletion or archiving. It’s helpful to set some base criteria you’ll use for doing broad sweeps initially. For example, you can decide not to look in detail at content older than five years, unless it belongs to a specific area.
Pro tip
To save time, evaluate your content at the site-level first instead of trying to look at every individual page or document.
4. Engage your content owners
While you’re working with your IT team to get your inventories complete, you can also reach out to some of the owners of the big content areas and start to get them on your side. You’ll need to be able to communicate what they’re going to be asked to do, the timing, and potential commitment needed for the content review. Content owners will need to be able to answer questions about whether the content is up to date and still relevant to the organization.
To help your content owners develop a set of suggested criteria for decision making, you can incorporate input from for your information management or records management team and other supports, including senior stakeholders in operations, user experience or risk management. Examples could include:
Only keep content that has been created or updated in the last three years.
Archive all inactive content from health and safety but ensure it’s kept for record keeping purposes.
5. Create content audit templates and tools to make it easy
Build out some easy-to-use tools to capture the decisions made by content owners. Shared spreadsheets or SharePoint lists are usually the best options since you’ll likely have multiple people providing their input. Within these tools, be specific about what decisions need to be captured and where.
Our basic template includes:
Name or location of the content – Usually as a site URL or a URL for specific pages or documents
Type of content – Documents, pages or other file types
Size or volume of content – This could numbers of pages or documents or the total size of the files in GB
Content owner(s) – The people who can make decisions about the content’s future
Permissions – For both creators and viewers
Summary of the content – What the content is about or what business value it brings
Content hygiene – Whether or not the content is still valid, useful and relevant to your organization
Analytics – Any indicators of user traffic
Pro tip
Where possible, fill in as much of the information before asking content owners for their input. Rarely will content owners have the time needed to complete an audit, so ensure you use their time as wisely as possible.
Download our free content audit template
Completing a content audit is an important piece of the puzzle to help you thoughtfully build out your future intranet or collaboration experience. We can get you started with our content audit template, but we’d also love to hear from you to see how we can help.
Senior Digital Workplace Consultant Natalie Veldhoen, helps to uncover the current state and plan the future direction of intranets, records and knowledge management solutions for Habanero clients. She helps organizations understand the value a well-designed and implemented information solution can bring to their business and guides design requirements. Natalie also ensures Habanero solutions bring value in terms of process improvement, adherence to corporate document control requirements and user adoption.
Natalie has experience designing and implementing information and knowledge management systems across a number of industries. She started her career as a math and science teacher, where she honed her facilitation and coaching skills, then found her place in library and information system design, leading projects with K-12 education, health care and a Calgary-based energy company. Natalie has bachelor’s degrees in astrophysics and education and a master’s of science degree in instructional media design. When not at work, she can be found working in her vegetable garden, completing home improvement projects or spending time outside with her family.
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there but just to comprehend those things which are there.
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