Collaboration is not a bad thing. Unfortunately, centrally-managed document collaboration capabilities of content management systems like SharePoint and other platforms have complicated matters. CMS Wire brought this topic to our attention in their article, “Content Sprawl Happens: How Will You Manage It?“
The concept was supposed to be simple, but eventually more user-driven cloud-based storage options were introduced. These solutions provided a centralized but somewhat disjointed method to store and share our content. Add to that concerns over security and compliance.
Content sprawl is the dispersed storage of large amounts of content that is produced by organizations on a daily basis. The content can be in the form of documents, forms, images, videos, etc., and includes archives and analytics, and a lot of it is unstructured, old and unused.
When collaboration gets messy, content sprawl happens. Unregulated and unmanaged growth of content within platforms is, in many ways, a natural byproduct of collaboration.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
