Enterprise Knowledge (EK) is a Core Sponsor of Drupal GovCon 2021! The virtual conference will take place from October 13th to the 15th. This year five EK experts will lead two half-day training sessions at the Drupal GovCon conference. Drupal GovCon brings together people from all over the country who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. Although there is a focus on government, there is also a heavy representation of attendees from the private, non-profit, and education sectors. 

Andrew Ratner, Consultant, will lead a training session with Yanko Ivanov, Principal Solution Consultant, and Nick Sacoman, Drupal developer, on “Designing User Experiences for Headless Drupal” on Wednesday, October 13th, 2021 from 9 AM to 1 PM ET.

Their session will focus on the principles of user-centric design that should be leveraged when designing multi-channel user experiences. Additionally, the session will discuss where the future of content management is going and how to best leverage content components in Drupal. With instructional guidance from EK’s experts, participants will have an opportunity to create and design a user journey map to deliver targeted omnichannel content, restructure large documents for content reuse, and perform semantic content modeling.

Lisa McCray, Senior Drupal developer, and Corinne Aherne, Senior Analyst, will lead the training session “Designing Custom Content Models and Search HIT Types” on Thursday, October 14th, 2021 from 9 AM to 1 PM ET.

Their training session will focus on industry best practices for developing a successful content strategy, including how to use elements of content structures to both build content types and design content models. McCray and Aherne will guide participants through an analysis of unstructured content to identify important semantic patterns and will then teach participants how to apply the findings when defining content types. Participants will also learn skills for intentionally structuring their content to improve search. 

Register first for the conference by creating an account here: Drupal GovCon 2021 in order to access EK’s half-day training sessions Designing User Experiences for Headless Drupal and Designing Custom Content Models and Search HIT Types.

The post Enterprise Knowledge to be a Core Sponsor and Training Leader at Drupal GovCon 2021 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The panel will focus on Knowledge Management, current techniques and approaches, how organizations are applying KM to improve organizational efficiencies, and the future of the discipline.

Registration to the event is open, and you can register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rocky-mountain-sla-8th-annual-mini-conference-tickets-169027747543.

The post EK at the Rocky Mountain SLA Virtual Conference appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

This is the fourth consecutive year that EK has achieved a place on the Inc. 5000. Of the tens of thousands of companies that have applied to the Inc. 5000 over the years, only a fraction have made the list more than once, let alone four times in a row. In addition to being listed as one of the country’s fastest growing companies, EK was also included again this year on Inc’s list of the best workplaces in the country.

“Our fourth consecutive year on this list is a great achievement for EK, and one that belongs to each member of our growing team” said Zach Wahl, CEO of EK. “What is most important to me is that we’ve successfully sustained our culture of kindness and collaboration as we’ve grown.” 

Joe Hilger, EK COO added, “Our growth means greater depth and breadth of capabilities to serve our clients, continuing to work at the intersection of Knowledge Management, Advanced Technologies, and Enterprise Artificial Intelligence.”

“The 2021 Inc. 5000 list feels like one of the most important rosters of companies ever compiled,” says Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc. “Building one of the fastest-growing companies in America in any year is a remarkable achievement. Building one in the crisis we’ve lived through is just plain amazing. This kind of accomplishment comes with hard work, smart pivots, great leadership, and the help of a whole lot of people.”

About Enterprise Knowledge

Enterprise Knowledge (EK) is a services firm that integrates Knowledge Management, Information Management, Information Technology, and Agile Approaches to deliver comprehensive solutions. Our mission is to form true partnerships with our clients, listening and collaborating to create tailored, practical, and results-oriented solutions that enable them to thrive and adapt to changing needs.

Our core services include strategy, design, and development of Knowledge and Information Management systems, with proven approaches for Taxonomy and Ontology Design, Project Strategy and Road Mapping, Brand and Content Strategy, Change Management and Communication, and Agile Transformation and Facilitation. At the heart of these services, we always focus on working alongside our clients to understand their needs, ensuring we can provide practical and achievable solutions on an iterative, ongoing basis.

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Methodology

Companies on the 2021 Inc. 5000 are ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2017 to 2020. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2017. They must be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2020. (Since then, some on the list may have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2017 is $100,000; the minimum for 2020 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Growth rates used to determine company rankings were calculated to three decimal places. There was one tie on this year’s Inc. 5000.  Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

About Inc. Media

The world’s most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including web sites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Vision Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

The post EK Included on Inc. 5000 for Fourth Consecutive Year appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In order to get you started, here are some tips to ensure your efforts result in a quality ontology design. Even though they sound simple, these practical design considerations will have a huge impact on the reusability and scalability of your ontology.

1. Identify a Clear Use Case. 

At the beginning of any ontology design effort, identify the 1-2 critical questions that the ontology needs to answer. Modeling for these specific use cases will help you to show immediate value by having a working model implemented quickly. If you attempt to model a full domain, you may be modeling indefinitely with no clear return on investment for the time spent. As we know, ontologies are never ‘complete’ and can always be expanded for additional use cases and domain coverage so it is important to understand the first few use cases that will show immediate return on investment. 

Some high-return example use cases we’ve worked on with success are: 

• Related Content Recommendations: Using relationships between similar content and shared attributes, like the topic or author of a document, can support a recommendation engine that surfaces content to users. 
• Natural Language Processing & Semantic Search: By using RDF and storing the ontology in triples, we can instantiate the model and traverse our data via relationships by asking natural language style questions that follow the same pattern using SPARQL. For example, if our model contains a relationship between two concepts:

Showing immediate value with a concrete use case can help to ensure participation and support from stakeholders and end users on additional use cases and ontology design efforts.

2. Reuse Standards & Existing Vocabularies.

Look first for models and standards that already exist and may inform your design. One of the most important benefits of using standards for ontology development is the interoperability that comes with open linked data. Depending on the industry, well-developed models may already exist. For example, the Veterinary Extension of SnomedCT from the Veterinary Terminology Services Laboratory Browser (VTSL Terminology Browser) is packed with defined vocabulary and classes for Procedures, Clinical Findings, Events, and more for the veterinary industry. Another industry specific model is the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) that has gathered many biomedical and clinical vocabularies in one web browser interface. Finding and leveraging an existing vocabulary or model for your industry can jumpstart your design and ensure that you are in line with the industry, even if your model is tailored or customized in some areas. One resource for finding industry or domain specific models is Linked Open Vocabularies, a collection of open source vocabularies. 

Non-industry specific standards are also important and can be key for saving time, such as pulling in descriptions and alternative labels from DBpedia or Wikidata, classes and relationships from Friend of a Friend (FOAF) or Schema.org, and modeling standards like W3C’s Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) for consistency. These standards will also ensure interoperability with any applications or datasets that are also using semantic web standards.

3. Leverage Consistent Naming.

Follow a naming convention to ensure that your resources are easily understood and referenceable by others. If your naming conventions are inconsistent, it can make it much harder to integrate with organizational tools or reference parts of the model. On the other hand, if the naming conventions clearly differentiate between classes, properties, and instances, it will be immediately obvious which type of resource someone is looking at or trying to return in a query or API call. Luckily, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has already defined some simple conventions:

These naming conventions will improve the clarity and quality of your model, and, as always, support interoperability.

4. Define Classes and Instances.

Two important components of any ontology design are classes and instances. These components allow us to model both the broad types of things and the specific examples of those things. The OWL standard defines these as:

“Classes provide an abstraction mechanism for grouping resources with similar characteristics. Like RDF classes, every OWL class is associated with a set of individuals, called the class extension. The individuals in the class extension are called the instances of the class.”

The differences between classes and instances can be tricky to define when designing a new ontology, especially if you are building off of an existing taxonomy or thesaurus. My colleague Ben describes how the top level of a well constructed taxonomy can often be repurposed as the classes of your ontology in his blog, From Taxonomy to Ontology. Taxonomies that include metadata fields like Content Type, Person, and Company can transition to ontological classes with the narrower terms, like Proposal, Jenni Doughty, and Enterprise Knowledge as instances of those classes, respectively. 

It’s important to understand which of your taxonomy terms are candidates for classes, subclasses, or instances. A good rule of thumb is to recognize which terms are types of things, versus examples of individual things. For example, a Quarterly Report can be a type of report, (a subclass of the Report class), while the 2020 Q3 Quarterly Report is an instance, or a specific example of a Quarterly Report. The distinction is important for ensuring your ontology model is complete and can be implemented successfully.

In OWL and RDFS, there are many useful axioms that can help ontologists express different types of relationships and classes and allow applications using the model to infer different things and further define a class. Some of these include:

• rdfs:subClassOf – Can define a class as a narrower or child class of another, allowing the inheritance of properties and additional inferences based on this relationship.
• owl:equivalentClass – Can indicate a class that is equivalent to another, indicating that the instances within are the same in both classes. This is not the same as saying that a class is owl:sameAs another class, meaning that they have the same intensional meaning. 
• owl:disjointWith – Can restrict classes from overlapping and containing the same instance in more than one class, reducing ambiguity when tagging or recommending content. For example, if we have an ontology with Animal and Car classes, we can disjoint these classes which will prevent the same instance of Jaguar from appearing in both classes.

Understanding which axioms to use will ensure that the ontology models not just the classes, but also contains information about those classes that further characterize the instances that fit within and how they relate to others.

5. Implement Iteratively.

Once you’ve designed the ontology model for your use case, it is time to begin mapping data sources to the ontology, or instantiating and implementing it with graph technology. As with all our design and implementation projects, EK recommends implementing an ontology iteratively, starting with 1-2 data sources or a high-level set of data from each intended source that is relevant to your priority use cases. When mapping or ingesting data, there are multiple best practices for Enterprise Knowledge Graph Design to assist in completing this task, including deciding what data to actually move and store in the knowledge graph, and which to map through a virtual graph.

The best way to ensure sustainable and scalable implementation is to start small, move quickly, and seek continuous feedback from end users and stakeholders. These stakeholders will be instrumental in ensuring that the resulting ontology and implementation meet business needs and end user expectations. A good rule of thumb is to engage a wide variety of stakeholders from all business areas that will be benefited or engaged in any part of the design, implementation, maintenance, or end user processes. Finally, through facilitated conversations or working sessions, these stakeholders will not only assist in the development of the ontology, but will also feel as if they have a stake in what has been designed. They can become your champions for future work and capabilities.

These five keys can help to ensure a strong, standards-based foundation for your ontology design that will result in an intuitive and interoperable model. For more information on how to begin designing an ontology, consider EK’s Two-Day Design Workshop or contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Keys to Successful Ontology Design appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

At EK we recognize that knowledge and people are critical resources in any business process and that process-related information should be captured, managed, and enhanced systematically in order to best contribute to the improvement and continuous development of any organization. When organizations fail to capture process-related knowledge or consider the perspective of end-users, the probability for process deferment is increased. 

Recently, I visited a client, to facilitate a Business Process Management (BPM) and Knowledge Management (KM) Workshop designed to:

• Teach participants about the foundations of BPM and KM;
• Showcase the alignment of KM and BPM; and
• Provide proven practices and approaches for how to use KM to reengineer business processes so that they are better representative of end-users and aligned with the organization’s strategic goals.

In the remainder of this blog, I will share three key considerations we challenged the organization to remember as they embark on reengineering a significant portion of their business processes. 

Knowledge Management: Incorporating People and Culture

Gartner defines Business Process Management (BPM) as: “a discipline that improves enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and business agility.” While this is a fine definition, it lacks acknowledgement of an organization’s greatest resource – their people. Too often I have found that organizations create and implement business processes that suffer because:

• There are too many assumptions about users;
• The complexity is unnecessarily excessive, typically as a result of strict governance and/or rigid hierarchy; 
• There is no vision or “why” for the process; and 
• There are insufficient communications and training for end-users and other stakeholders. 

To avoid process deferment and instead address the hiccups called out above, process engineers should leverage a “KM Mindset.” At EK, we define Knowledge Management as the people, processes, content, culture, and enabling technologies necessary to capture, manage, share, and find an organization’s knowledge. So when I say “KM Mindset” I am referring to a thought process that considers people, processes, content, culture, and technology equally. During our time on-site with the client, we encountered a great example of this type of thought process, seen below: 

At the organization, an individual created a business process for streamlining content creation. One of the tasks within his business process was to have content creators manually enter pertinent metadata. Utilizing a “KM Mindset”, the individual realized that a portion of the organization’s content creators struggled with determining the correct metadata and/or simply viewed applying metadata as a time-intensive “extra step.” Therefore, instead of requiring content creators to apply metadata within the document properties, he designed the process to leverage a prepared content type that contained a table with quick parts to make reporting metadata seem as natural as typingthe  content. 

Thus by leveraging a “KM Mindset”, this individual’s solution did not only aimed to deliver “operational excellence and business agility.” Rather, it thoughtfully considered and incorporated the unique aspects of the organization’s people (current skill sets/preferences), culture (time-pressed organization), content (content types that enable efficiency), and technology (leverage what the organization already had) to generate a process that would actually help to streamline the content creation process in a manner that was easy for end-users. 

Design Thinking: Remembering the End-User

At EK we define Design Thinking as a human-centered approach to problem solving that brings together the needs of people, technology, and business to solve complex problems with innovative solutions. The approach consists of five phases: Empathize, Defne, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Each phase challenges designers to think beyond themselves in order to best assure they are working towards a solution that is representative of the end-user’s goals, motivations, frustrations, and needs. Below is a graphic we use to help our clients better understand how to leverage the Design Thinking process when creating business processes. It is important to note that each phase is accompanied with a question or consideration, as the intention is not to pigeon hole the business process designer, rather help effectively apply the design thinking method during the Design Phase of BPM. 

While at the client site we participated in a business process that did not prioritize the end-user – the process for obtaining a visitor’s badge. While we understood the need to prioritize security over ease due to the sensitive nature of the organization’s work, the process became arduous as we visited multiple offices with varying instruction and conflicting guidelines. This frustrated us and our sponsor, a KM professional, leading us to jokingly ask: “Did the engineers ever prototype or test this process from the perspective of the end-user?” Ultimately successful in our process, both ourselves and the client felt that more a streamlined process could be implemented to save both groups valuable time in the future.

Therefore by taking a design thinking approach while also channeling a “KM Mindset”, business process engineers can improve the likelihood of delivering processes that easily translate to increased efficiency and optimization, as a direct result of end-user awareness and alignment. 

Agile Methodologies: Utilizing Prioritization to Maintain Focus

“But how do you not boil the ocean?” Our clients frequently ask us this question, especially when we challenge them to adopt a “KM Mindset” and take a Design Thinking approach to creating their business processes. This is because when individuals begin to create personas and draft user-stories, a large amount of new ideas and unanswered questions typically surface, which can be easily overwhelming. Therefore, we encourage our clients to utilize a variety of agile prioritization methods to help them extract (or validate their hypothesized) core challenges or pain-points that they will address in their new or re-engineered business process. 

While there are various methods and techniques for prioritizing, I have included a few of my favorites below as well as insights on how to best use them: 

• MoSCoW Method: A tried and true prioritization method that can help individuals think through what is critical to the business process versus what can be considered for future optimization. 
  • Must Have: Critical to the solution / end-user(s). If not included, the business process is considered a failure.
  • Should Have: Important, but not crucial for the business process. Considered top “nice-to-haves.”
  • Could Have: Desirable, but not necessary for the business process. Considered low “nice-to-haves.”
  • Won’t: Least critical or perhaps  unaligned with the business process’ goals and overarching strategy.
• Dot Voting: A simple, hands-on prioritization method that allows a group of individuals to quickly visualize what the group considers to be top priorities via the placement of dots. Sometimes, I take this method a step further by requiring certain members of a group to think from the perspective of a specific persona or user-group. This helps to ensure the team does not revert and prioritize based on their own wants, needs, or frustrations. 

Conclusion

Whether your organization is in the process of reengineering existing processes to meet new demands and constraints or setting forth to bring uniformity to your organization via processes,  we believe the alignment of KM and BPM is necessary in order for any organization to be able to adapt faster and more accurately in the face of changing requirements and framework conditions. Interested in our BPM & KM Workshop? Reach out for more information. 

The post How Knowledge Management Can Improve Your Business Process appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Applying any of the principles identified in the above infographic can upgrade your search strategy to a future-ready, semantic experience. Whether you think your search needs a simple update or is ready for a serious upgrade, we can help. EK offers a range of search-specific services that will produce actionable recommendations. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

The post The 5 Key Components of a Semantic Search Experience appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

On a daily basis, EK consultants create presentations for clients including everything from facilitation materials for knowledge management workshops and meetings, to educational web resources for web products. As a design enthusiast, I’m often asked by my colleagues, “Leah, can you help make this PowerPoint look pretty?” but you don’t have to be Monet to produce great aesthetics. Follow these simple design tips to create visually engaging content to enhance your message.

First, Content Before Design

Before you dive into design, you need a foundation — content! The key message you want to convey should dictate your design, not the other way around. Let design emphasize your message and support your greater content strategy. Similar to how content types act as a reusable template to produce consistent results, think of design elements the same way; as a template to create consistent, usable designs. Let’s not forget that the most important aspect when creating any business asset is your audience and their needs. You wouldn’t start building a house without the blueprints, so be sure to build your design from a content foundation.

To build your content foundation, think about what story you want to tell; then think about what images and visuals will help you tell it.

• Do you want your message to flow in a certain order?
• Are there words or messages you want to emphasize?
• Would your audience better understand your content if it was paired with a photo or repurposed as a visual?

Second, Apply Design Principles

Now that you have your content, let’s make it beautiful! When I’m creating any sort of asset, these are the design elements I always keep in mind to create clean, visually pleasing designs for my target audience.  

Alignment

This seems like such a simple element, but the more I review others’ work, the more I realize alignment is often overlooked. To achieve top quality designs, it helps to picture your elements on a grid. Maybe you have text and an image you’d like to pair together – choose left, right, or center alignment. The key here is consistency.

Proximity

Proximity is the nearness between elements, which provides structure and organization to a layout. Related items should be placed close to one another, while unrelated items should be farther apart. A close proximity indicates a relationship and creates a visual unit; when elements are placed together, the eye perceives them as a group.

Balance

Think of your layout as a scale where each of your design elements has a weight. Whether it’s text, an image, color block, etc., consider its size and how much weight it has in relation to other elements in the layout.

To achieve the weight you’re looking for, there are three types of balance in graphic design to experiment with. When deciding which to use, you’ll want to think back to your messaging —what are you trying to achieve? What do you want to emphasize?

• Symmetrical balance is a mirror image balance. If you draw a line down the center, each side will have the same visual weight. This helps to achieve structure and organization.
• In asymmetrical balance, both sides have a different weight, which produces a more casual look and feel. The dynamicness of the layout focuses an audience’s attention on the message.
• With a radial balance, all elements radiate out from the center in a circular nature. All elements will guide the eye to the center of the layout.

Color

Color improves contrast, assists in readability, and grabs the viewer’s eye. If you’re unsure what color palette to use, start with a neutral color or work within your organization’s established brand colors. If your organization doesn’t have brand colors to rely on, consider color theory and explore complementary or analogous colors.

Keep in mind, color evokes emotion — which can work for, or against you. When grounding your visuals in the key messages you’re trying to convey, be mindful of the emotions you’d like to elicit with that key message. Then, select colors that will help highlight those emotions. Also, don’t go overboard with your color scheme. Find a few colors that work well together and stick with that palette.

Typography

Just like your color choice, your font selection should also match the emotional tone of your message. Generally, serif is best for readability in print, while sans-serif is best for creating a legible web product. Here are a few basic rules of thumb:

• Avoid using too many fonts at once; 2-3 types is the general limit. A good trick is to use a variation of the same font to help achieve balance and variety — try bolding or italicizing your text.
• Text with a consistent purpose should have a consistent size. Headings or other content you want emphasized should be larger, but any body copy should be the same size throughout your layout.
• In larger bodies of text, left alignment makes content more readable.

Space

It can be tempting to fill up an entire page, but sometimes less is more. Space refers to the empty areas between components in the design. Empty space draws the eye to a point of focus and places more emphasis on the main item. Think back to your messaging. What should stand out? Create some space around it.

Empty space improves readability and creates a hierarchy. Think about how the elements are arranged and grouped in the design.

Summary

The most important thing to remember is that your message comes first; design comes second. Content and design should work together to strengthen communication. Once you’ve refined your key messages, basic design elements will help you create your own timely, professional, polished materials to help your audience understand and retain key messages.

Want to create visually appealing web content for your company’s website or intranet?

EK can help you identify your organization’s key messages and determine how to communicate them with relevant design — contact us to learn more.

The post 6 Simple Design Principles to Supplement Your Messaging appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

SharePoint master pages define the top and bottom elements that will appear on each page of the site where the master page is applied.

It is strongly advised that users altering SharePoint master pages have experience with hypertext markup language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS), as well as debugging SharePoint, and using SharePoint Designer (SPD) or PowerShell. This walkthrough will not include the usage of SPD or PowerShell; however, debugging may be necessary, which could require their usage.

Making the KM Case for a Custom-Designed SharePoint Master Page

We mentioned in part one that the five workstreams of knowledge management lend themselves to creating user-centric experiences, and that well-developed user interfaces should be “intuitive, inviting, and effective” when determining design components.  

Custom-designed SharePoint master pages can improve knowledge management initiatives by:

• Leading users to feel more comfortable and familiar with the SharePoint site.
• Decreasing the number of clicks needed to arrive at relevant pages and forms.

Many clients desire functionality that allows their users to submit content to a knowledge base, browse content, and search within content using a refinable search interface. By design, SharePoint includes this functionality, but may require three or more clicks to arrive at the desired location. While SharePoint admins can create quick links on the home menu to send users to these locations, a more user-centric design might include a header and footer that is similar to that of the client’s website. The navigation links, then, would be used to quickly route users to submission forms, selected lists or libraries, and a search interface.

Custom-designed SharePoint master pages can create a unique overall experience within SharePoint, increasing familiarity, comfort, and enthusiasm to participate in your company’s KM initiatives.

Getting Started with Your Master Page

Before building your new SharePoint master page, we recommend creating a folder where your code, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any images files associated with your master page, will live. This folder will be uploaded through your site collection’s Design Manager to easily reference their content.

Inside your folder, create an HTML file with markup for the top and bottom elements. This markup should include reference attributes to any styles or scripts that will apply to the master page elements. In this blog, we’ll be creating a master page that mirrors EK’s homepage.

Our markup includes reference attributes to one CSS file and a body tag with three child attributes: header, an empty placeholder div, and footer.

Once you’ve created your HTML file and rendered it successfully locally, you’re now ready to upload your custom master page to SharePoint.

Using SharePoint’s Design Manager

In part one, we referenced Design Manager, a tool that becomes available after publishing infrastructure is enabled at the site collection level. Design Manager assists in the preparation of custom-designed SharePoint sites, allowing SharePoint administrators and designers to use it as a one-stop shop for managing aesthetic customizations.

To access Design Manager, open your Site Settings and select “Design Manager” under Look and Feel.

From Design Manager’s left navigation, select “Upload Design Files.” In this section’s introductory blurb, you’ll find a URL that can be used to map your drive to a network folder or to manipulate files directly from the browser. Accessing the given URL will redirect you to the Master Page Gallery. The Master Page Gallery is the design center of your SharePoint site collection. Inside it lives the code governing the display of each component of the site collection’s sites, including its search results and navigation.

Inside your Master Page Gallery, create a new folder where you can upload and publish major versions of your HTML code and any supporting code and images. We’ve created a folder named “EK Master Page” that includes three files: ek-master.html, style.css, and ek-logo.png.

Back in Design Manager, select item four from the left navigation, “Edit Master Pages.”

Select “Convert an HTML file to a SharePoint master page.” A modal will display, allowing you to select the location of the item you’ll convert to a master page. Navigate to the folder you uploaded to your Master Page Gallery, and select the HTML file.

Upon successful upload, the HTML file will be added to the master page list with the status “Conversion successful.” Click the “Conversion successful” hyperlink to preview your master page.

Editing Your New Master Page

When SharePoint converts your HTML document to a master page, it generates hundreds of lines of code that allow the page to be usable within its system. As you’ll likely notice, a yellow div has been added below your content. The text within the div reads, “This div, which you should delete, represents the content area that your Page Layouts and pages will fill. Design your Master Page around this content placeholder.” The final step of creating the master page is moving that content placeholder to the location in your code where you’ve added your placeholder div.

To complete this step, you’ll need to navigate back to Design Manager’s Edit Master Pages section and download the code associated with your master page file.

In your code editor, find the div with the data-name “ContentPlaceHolderMain.” Select the div and all of its child components. Cut and paste it in the location of your placeholder div, then save the updated code. Remember, if you had applied any styling to your placeholder div, such as bottom margins to balance a fixed positioned footer, you’ll need to re-apply that to div[data-name=”ContentPlaceHolderMain”] and reupload the CSS file to your Master Page Gallery.

When you’ve edited your master page HTML, navigate back to your Master Page Gallery, either by accessing it through the hyperlink in Design Manager’s Upload Design Files, or by using your mapped network folder. Reupload your master page HTML and any other updated files to the folder you created, and publish major versions of each file. From Design Manager’s Edit Master Pages, select “Conversion successful” next to your filename to see a preview of the updated master page.

Applying Your New Master Page

With your new master page converted and content placeholder in place, you’re now able to apply your master page to a SharePoint site. Using the gear in the top right corner, navigate to Site Settings. Under Look and Feel, select “Master Pages.”

Depending on your desired settings, specify where your new master page should be used. Site Master Page would apply the master page to your publishing pages–any pages that are uploaded to the site collection’s “Pages” library. System Master Page would apply the master page to views of your administrative pages, document libraries, and lists. For consistency, and to create the intuitive design that makes SharePoint customization a noteworthy feature of KM initiatives, we have applied our master page to both site and system pages.

With your new master page applied, your SharePoint homepage can change significantly. See our change below.

The SharePoint out-of-the-box view of our site collection’s homepage.

Our SharePoint homepage with custom master page applied.

Is Something Missing?

“Where’s the title?”

“Where has the navigation gone?”

You may be questioning the whereabouts of certain features that you expected to appear once your master page was applied. Custom-designed SharePoint master pages do not include out-of-the-box (OOTB) master page features, such as navigation and title, by default. Each of these features is displayed differently dependent upon the master page you use. EK works closely with clients to determine which features should be included in their customized design to maximize their KM efforts.

Now that your SharePoint master page is created, the final step is to create a custom page layout, which will determine where items are displayed on the page. We’ll explain it thoroughly in part three of “How to Make SharePoint Not Look like SharePoint.”

Looking to create your own customized SharePoint master page to increase your company’s KM efforts? Contact us. We’ll be glad to help you.

The post How to Make SharePoint Not Look Like SharePoint, Part Two: Designing Your Master Page appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In this Meetup, participants will explore the challenges and possibilities of co-creating with a group of peers using one of the DC Council issues as inspiration, biker and pedestrian safety in the DC area, for a one-day design thinking experience. Attendees will learn the basic process in a supportive learning environment as theyrethink the way we approach biker and pedestrian safety in the DC area.

The post Meetup: Introduction to Design Thinking appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Event Description

When working within the Design Thinking process, defining the problem is often one of the more difficult aspects to take on. After all, how do you go about taking the incredible amounts of information gleaned from empathizing and make sense of it to find the most important underlying problem? This activity will walk participants through a couple of options to better hone their sense-making and defining skills, and also allow room for dicussion from the audience to learn additional best practices and helpful tips.

You can register for the event on the OpenIDEO DC Chapter MeetUp page. Registration is $10, and includes the workshop, wine, beer, and appetizers.

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