I love this quote, (thank you Christine), it is so true.  SharePoint is an incredibly smart platform – but it needs to be fed the right things so it can work properly.

What are you feeding SharePoint?  How about documents with no metadata and old document properties?  That will mess up your search results in pretty quick time.  What about capturing list items and leaving out half the information – how clean and accurate do you think your data will be in a year from now if you carry on doing that? Or what about not feeding it anything at all – how can the platform work for you if you don’t give it any instructions and information?

It doesn’t have to be complicated – sometimes the simplest solutions are the ones you’ll use the longest. Just make sure you put clean data in, and make sure you understand your business process so it can be mapped well to the functionality available to you.  You will be amazed at how much simpler things can become when you do just that. Keep at it, you got this.