Monday Morning Fairy Tale: Paying Protection Money to the Big Bad Wolf of Paper Documents

Long a source of intimidation in the neighborhood, Wolf was known to be brash, mean and not a little bit unpleasant. His walks through the downtown business district caused everyone to run for cover. He was bad…real bad….Dirty Harry Bad.

On this morning, he was on his rounds collecting ‘protection money’ from his clients. His first stop was a real estate company that had just finished its conversion from paper-files to a new SharePoint 2007 system installed by a Microsoft Gold Partner with deep experience in the platform. : )

“I’m here for your payment”, said the Wolf, “and if I don’t have it in 5 minutes I’ll huff and puff and scatter all of the paper files you have in those file cabinets over there all across downtown!”

“Huff and puff if you must”, said the defiant business owner, “but you won’t be getting one more dollar from me.”

The Wolf huffed and puffed, scattering all of the office’s contents and filing cabinets but was surprised when no paper, outside of the paper sitting on individual’s desks, began to fill the air.

Shocked and awed, the Wolf said, “Where’s all your paper? This isn’t having quite the impact I had hoped for.”

“We recently converted everything to digital documents using a Fujitsu scanner, scanning our paper documents directly into our SharePoint Document Libraries. Even the documents that we had on our desks will be easy to find for review because we automatically added bar codes to the documents with SharePoint’s support of embedded barcodes. SharePoint provides that capability right out of the box.”

“And how did you add barcodes to your documents automatically using SharePoint”, the wolf asked, intrigued.

“In all of the document libraries where we store our docs we turned on support for barcodes by choosing Information Management Policy Settings -> Define a Policy -> Enable Barcodes. Then we chose the option ‘Prompt users to insert a barcode before saving or printing’.”

The Wolf was impressed, but was a little disappointed in the outcome of his threat.

The business owner continued, “Configuring our document libraries in this way forces a barcode to be added to our documents automatically. Since bar codes become a piece of metadata within the document library, we can retrieve the scattered documents from the street, search on the unique barcode number in SharePoint’s search window and retrieve the entire document again for review.”

“Well, couldn’t you just scan the bar code as well to find the document”, asked the Wolf.

“Yes, we certainly could have…but I think our bar code reader is probably somewhere on a downtown roof thanks to you”, replied the miffed business owner.

“Maybe I could get the name of that Microsoft Gold Partner you hired”, said the Wolf. “I have some reorganization of my own that I’d like to use SharePoint 2007 to accomplish”.

Story Author: Lee Reed
ThoughtBridge, Atlanta, GA

Lee Reed is an expert in collaboration and user adoption on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform. His consulting with companies large and small throughout the East Coast has resulted in many successful collaboration environments and increased user adoption.

Lee is currently the Director of Business Process and SharePoint Education for Thoughtbridge, a Microsoft Gold Partner focused exclusively on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform.