SharePoint Governance Kit

Governance in Communications, Policy and SharePoint Controls

Scott Chapman — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:20:00 GMT

Once you have helped form your organization’s SharePoint Governance Committee, it will be vital for the committee to form a clear, consistent yet fair Policy regarding SharePoint usage. But where will the committee begin? What rules should they make? Should the rules be stringent or loose?

Documented communications and Policy and Procedure are the first steps for a governance committee. Then IT Administration can follow through by setting various controls in SharePoint Central Administration >> SharePoint Governance Settings to help automate the enforcement of some of the rules outlined in the policy.

Of course, the committee may need some help knowing where to start or even what to address. This is where the IT Administrator can come in handy. The IT Administrator can give a list of common SharePoint Governance issues to the committee, and the committee can decide which of the items may or may not apply to the organization. The committee may also have a few ideas of their own regarding issues they’d like to address in governance.

Following are some of the more common items committees will address:

· Site Quotas: size limitations per site and amount of sites in a site collection.

· Site Provisioning: easing the process of requesting and approving new sites while also making it impossible to create sites without following proper procedure.

· Site Navigation: making it as easy as possible for users to find the sites they belong to. Also make it easy to find sites a user may not be member of.

· Usage Monitoring: See hits on sites and send alerts to owners/administrators of unused sites.

· Emails or Communications regarding administrative activity.

Once the committee has decided on its rules and policies regarding SharePoint usage, the next important step is for the committee to draft and approve a written communication to go out to all users in the organization. The communication should have an exciting kick-off feel to it, announcing the new release of SharePoint, all of its collaborative, publishing and reporting features and information relevant to the unique qualities of the business. The communication should also point all users to the newly formed Policy and Procedure for SharePoint – it may be wise to make a Policy and Procedure Site and point users there in the initial communication.

Remember, COMMUNICATION IS EVERYTHING!!! The heavier the structure of governance in SharePoint, the more communication should take place. This is because a user group who is unsure of the reason for SharePoint or a user group who cannot effectively feel SharePoint may likely become a user group that will not fully adapt to using SharePoint as the committee had hoped and planned. Communication to personnel must always take place first, before any rules are put in place within SharePoint. This is because surprising and/or seemingly unfair rules that defer user’s hopeful expectations will hinder adoption needed to prove a worthy ROI.

Remember the SharePoint Governance Kit!

Once the SharePoint Governance Committee has decided on the rules and policy to be set for SharePoint and its user group, the IT Administrator can go through the SharePoint Governance menu within Central Administration and set all the necessary and available controls for properly managing SharePoint according the desires of the new policy.

Can you imagine the potential for authorized users to create sites at will, without some Users and Administrators ever knowing of the sites’ existence? If you have 20 different departments at Corporate HQ, and each department has an average of five administrative users, imagine the amount of sub-sites they could potentially create for all of their different projects, initiatives, events, etc. What you need is an ability to monitor or review a list of all sites that have been created. Why? With heavy usage, many sites get created and then are soon forgotten and unused, therefore taking up unnecessary space on your servers. Some sites have a tendency go off into oblivion and hide. The Site Provisioning Extender makes it very easy for an authorized user to request and create a site. Built-in workflows allow for an organized manner of creating and accounting for new sites. The Site Provisioning Extender can also help you with this issue by keeping track of all sites created and list them by geography, site type, titles, disciplines (e.g. Business Intelligence) and more. The metadata captured while a user is creating a new site also makes it much easier for both Users and Administrators to find sites.

The Site navigation Extender allows users to see which sites they belong to and what permission levels they have. The user may click on a header control at the top of his Home Page titled My Team Sites. This header is a drop-down list which displays all the sites this User belongs to with permission levels of Contributor or higher – in any existing SharePoint farm! The Site Navigation Extender also provides web part controls that allow a user to see all the sites he or she owns as well as all sites he or she is a member of – across all existing farms (Intranet, Internet, Extranet/DMZ).

The Site Directory Extender uses the metadata from the Site Provisioning Extender to help users find sites more quickly and efficiently. This may help users easily find relevant data rather than creating new sites with duplicate data since the original site(s) could not be found.

The Quota Management Extender is probably one of the most valuable tools in the SharePoint Governance Kit. This tool allows an administrator to manage quotas at individual site levels as well as set alerts for the site administrators to receive when respective sites are nearing quota limits.

Remember – governance and planning go hand-in-hand. If you do not address governance in your SharePoint configuration and deployment plans, you will quickly end up with a system that is unorganized and out of control. Some users may still try to use SharePoint, but most users will not benefit from it, and the expected Return on Investment will likely not be in sight. Don’t let this happen to you!

Help form a strong SharePoint Governance Committee!
Work with the Committee to form a solid (& workable) policy around SharePoint!
Use the SharePoint Governance Kit to make setting and monitoring your governance controls as easy as possible!

Forming a SharePoint Governance Committee

Scott Chapman — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:35:00 GMT

Most would agree it is important to establish a Governance Strategy of some degree, but how will this strategy or plan be conceived? Let's suppose you are the SharePoint Administrator. Will you create this plan on your own and then pass it around to your boss, the CIO and a couple good business contacts for their approval? It is likely this will not be good enough to support effective governance for SharePoint. Of course, there may be exceptions to this, as your company may be small - less than 100 people - and you may be the SharePoint Administrator as well as one of the owners or leaders. If this is the case, you may be able to effectively document a strategy as well as communicate the plan along with all associated policies and rules. But, what if your company grows quicker than expected to 250 employees? Will you still want to be running this governance gamut alone? Consider at least two things:

SharePoint tends to snowball in usage as time goes on. Many users discover it, and as soon as they truly adopt and "get it," their reliance on the product increases significantly.
Many, if not most, established companies have downsized or are downsizing now only to anticipate rebuilding and realizing growth in the next five years. *Part of your committee's challenge will be to address ROI -- how to ultimately use SharePoint to maximize your company's operational efficiencies and revenues and spur growth for your company.

It would be prudent to expect growth for your company, form a cohesive committee, and create a solid plan for increased usage over the next few years. Once you have decided that a Governance Committee should be formed, the next question is, "Who should be on this committee?" In some cases a better question may be, "Who should not be on this committee?" You certainly do not want anyone's time wasted, and you also do not want anyone wasting the committee's time. Forming the correct committee is the first step towards good end-user adoption.

Choose your committee candidates wisely. Can you develop a list of candidates on your own? You might be able to, or you might want the help of a couple others - this really depends on who you are, who you know in the company and the size or breadth of your company. If you decide you need help and are unsure of where to start, talk with your Director, VP or CIO. They should be able to help you get a good start and can help you connect with others to help form a list of appropriate candidates. Your management team also may have a sound idea of some persons who absolutely should be on the committee.

Some things to keep in mind when selecting candidates:

Who is/are the sponsor/s of SharePoint? Who in leadership championed this product and brought it into the company? Who is the purse holder? The answer may be you. Or the answer may be the COO and the Marketing Executive. Sponsors should be part of the committee.
Who are the Stakeholders? Stakeholders are typically business or operational leaders whose work, agendas, departments or SBUs will be directly impacted by SharePoint. If many Stakeholders are identified, two or three may be elected to represent all Stakeholders.
Does your company have any Business Analysts who happen to know both business processes and SharePoint well? BAs can sometimes be over-looked, but the truth is that a good BA will have an ability to gain the trust of and communicate well with business leaders as well as IT personnel. Need some promotional energy and charisma? This would be a good person to consider having on the committee. It is ironic that BAs can sometimes be overlooked to sit on a governance committee, because it is often a BA who will think of things or areas often over-looked by Sponsors, Stakeholders or various IT Administrators or Managers.
Who are the Power Users in your company? Power Users are typically non-management end users of various levels who have a good applicable knowledge of business processes as well as the product. Power Users are sometimes the most effective persons on the committee because of their working knowledge of the (SharePoint) system and are regularly using the product to complete their daily operational tasks. Like Business Analysts, Power Users can and often will address items that may be over-looked by others on the committee.
Can you think of any IT employees who ought to be on the committee? The CIO, SharePoint Administrator, Database Administrator, Infrastructure Manager, Support Desk Manager, BI Manager and Managers of any integrated products are all IT persons to consider. Again, this depends on the size and breadth of your company as well as the stake these various people may have in SharePoint.
Do you have a Legal Department and/ or a Compliance Department? Depending on how SharePoint is going to be used in your company, you may want to have representation from Legal and Compliance on the committee. Attractive decisions are only good if they are legal and compliant.

The gravity or reality of forming a committee is that not everyone chosen will actually care about the product compared to others who very much understand the potential impact of SharePoint and care about its direction in and for the company. It is imperative to have people on the governance committee who understand the importance of good governance and who will proactively get involved with all the governance decisions to be made. If you have any apathetic committee members, no matter what their title may be, you risk the quality of governance. Try at all costs to avoid having any prop-heads on the committee.

So, how do you rally all these candidates to join the committee amongst their busy schedules? This can be somewhat of an art and again depends on who you are and who you know - or better yet, who knows you and trusts you. If you are the SharePoint Administrator in IT and feel timid or like your interpersonal skills are shaky at best, you may want to solicit the help of a good IT/Business liaison to help you champion the idea of a committee to all the selected candidates. This can sometimes require a lot of networking, promoting and charisma (and sometimes just good ol' fashioned teeth-pulling), as it is not always immediately clear or evident to high-level managers why any of their time should be spent on SharePoint Governance decisions.

Always remember that the beginning of a good strategic plan for SharePoint Governance begins with the right Governance Committee...

A Beginner’s Look at SharePoint Governance

Scott Chapman — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:08:00 GMT

So you have SharePoint 2007 rolled out, and things are going great for you as the SharePoint Administrator - the one in charge of this wonderful product your company has finally elected to use for the organization!

But wait. Do you have a governance strategy in place? Do you need one? Are you wondering what governance is, really? You'll find that governance is defined as the rules which address how SharePoint will be set up, organized, and managed. Imagine our country and states with absolutely no government - complete autonomy. Think there would be utter chaos and anarchy? You betcha! The same goes for SharePoint. It is likely very important for you and your organization to have a governance plan of some degree in place to avoid any disorder or confusion. But how tightly should SharePoint governance controls be set for your organization? This is an important question for several reasons:

How much freedom do you want to allow in your plan? Do you want to allow the Marketing Department the ability to add custom design to their site and add their own web parts?
How many controls in SharePoint need to be set in place versus how much written policy and communication regarding the rules is sent out to users in the organization?
If governance is too tight and restrictive, will users even adopt and use it?
If governance is too permissible, will or could SharePoint eventually stop working?
Is your organization interested in having a branded SharePoint product across the board, for all departments and sites, or should each organizational department be able to identify its own look, brand and feel?

These and many other questions may be asked when considering whether you need a governance plan and how that plan should look. Many of the answers will depend on things like company culture, company size, the industry, public or private, and so forth. Keep in mind that adoption is everything - if users don't like and won't use their given site(s) as originally planned and hoped, will the ROI for SharePoint be there in the end?

Let's suppose your organization has 15,000 employees and is heavily regulated by the SEC, SOX, and several other agencies. You may want a rather intricate governance plan, as well as a committee to help create and implement that plan. The SharePoint Governance Kit would be beneficial, as it will help you quickly navigate around SharePoint and Central Administration to implement and manage all of your necessary governance controls.

Governance in Life Sciences - DIA Conference

Zeeshan Subzwari — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:41:00 GMT

Last week (2/9/09-2/13/09), speakTECH was an exhibiitor at the Drug Information Association (DIA) Conference in Philadelphia, PA. The conference was a great success as both a networking / marketing opportunity and an educational event for all parties where a lot of vital information was exchanged and delivered. Many major Life Sciences companies (including many of speakTECH's current customers), product partners, and other service and solution providers from around the world were present at the conference. This conference specifically focused on EDMS (Electronic Document Management Systems) in Life Sciences.

speakTECH had an opportunity to talk about the many solutions we have created in the Life Sciences/Pharma space and showcase our productized service offerings and solutions such as the SharePoint Governance Kit - a solution offering that really spurred from our numerous implementations in the Life Sciences space based on the commmon business pains we saw in multi-matrix environments as they related to EDMS and SharePoint Governance. As we talked to Scientists and Researchers, Reg Ops managers, Publishing heads, IT managers and many other representatives on various subjects such as controlled SharePoint solutions, SharePoint/Documentum integrations, Validation Services, Scientist/Researcher networks, CRO (Contract Research Organization) - facing partnership applications, etc., the need of SharePoint Governance often surfaced, whether we were talking prospective, new, or existing customers of SharePoint.

We talked about our views on the need for SharePoint governance based on customer experiences, and we also demo'ed the SharePoint Governance Kit. Many Life Sciences customer representatives were especially intrigued to find out about the site discovery capabilities. As we know, Life Sciences companies are multi-matrix environments where the product development process spans across a multitude of departments and areas, resulting in information dispersed across many departmental-level sites and across intranets/extranets. Furthermore, many outside parties such as agencies, CRO's and contracted drug manufcaturers, etc. are involved in the process; and, as a result customers might have information scattered across multiple site collections, farms, intranets/extranets. Life Sciences customer were amazed when they found out that sites could be centrally provisioned, and site discovery services based on the metadata used when provisioning these site were available OOB with the kit (discovery on the site level is available in our kit - not OOB with SharePoint), and all of this was offered in a centralized manner. We demo'ed how users could very quickly find the site they are looking for within a multitude of sites, and request access to a site they did not have access to.

The SharePoint Governance Kit was certainly an offering that caught the eye of many Life Sciences companies, and we will be following up with them to find out more about their specific governance needs. If you are a Life Sciences company, please contact us and we'll be glad to help :-). Look forward to writing more about how we have applied our governance offerings to Life Sciences in the near future and look forward to the next DIA conference in June 2009 in San Diego, CA.

Applying Governance to High Tech Manufacturing

Aaron Sloman — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:53:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we sponsored the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit in San Jose, it was a great event, and we were very excited with the discussions, especially given the economic outlook. We participated in a couple of sessions, including the keynote, what was interesting was the alignment of our governance kit, with the needs of the clients we spoke to. Here’s some scenario’s for High Tech which we address (and in many cases, already have addressed) with the Governance Kit

Partnerships across company boundary’s. – the current economy’s creating a more collaborative ecosystem, where past competitors are becoming partners, to deliver products to the market. This is especially with design teams, who are working with other companies on R&D and product development. Using the SharePoint Governance Kit we have created, our clients are able to define extranet collaboration farms, and seamlessly, based on the collaboration request their site’s provisioned in the location defined by the governance policy.

Internal Company Collaboration – The ability to take an item that’s been worked on, and put it into a workspace, where versioning and locking exists, especially across geography’s, as most teams are virtual these days. What’s great about this collaboration is the ability to add functions such as Calendar, Tasks, and social networking aspects like forums and blogs.

Corporate Storage – Where we enforce that all company information is saved to the network and categorized accordingly J

There’s a few more, I will update this posting when In have some time – Happy Collaborating

Governance Workshops 101 - Part 1 "What to know"

Brian Faunce — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:21:00 GMT

Recently, someone asked my opinion on what I felt to be the guiding principles for an effective SharePoint Governance Workshop? In my humble opinion, there really are no incredible secrets that stand out above and beyond the obvious:

· Knowledge: Know the product and how it applies to every aspect of the customer --- Know SharePoint and all the key features that may be utilized by a client or discussed during a Governance Interview Session. Otherwise, you may be caught in an akward position. So, study up! :-)

· Effectiveness: Engage and Understand your audience --- No rocket science here, you should have learned how to do this by now.

· Accountability: Prepare your audience appropriately for what's expected of them --- Understand the roles of those individuals in your interview sessions what their influence and impact they carry within their department/organization.

· Purpose and Outcome: Ask the right questions and have the ability to disseminate information into meaningful and relevant governance policies --- Once again, no rocket science here... just apply all the skills and experience that has made you a great Engagement Manager.

Perhaps, there may be one that is not included in the list above that I have chosen to call a bit more attention to, that of which has become cornerstone of our Governance Engagements: ADAPTATION. As we have successfully completed countless Governance Workshops across many verticals with clients of varied cultures, size, experience and knowledge base, we have exercised our ability to educate and adapt ourselves to produce the most value. In many cases, the development and delivery of a Governance Package is only the beginning for this type of engagement. Following this, you'll find yourself as a supporting party to the ongoing governance eco-system you have helped define within the organization. Allowing yourself to follow methods of adaptation, understanding how to best educate and be educated by your client, will ensure the long-term success of any Governance Package you produce. After all, both your client and SharePoint will continue to adapt and evolve long into the future. You and your Governance Plan should be able to do the same.

In an upcoming series on Governance Workshops, I will share thoughts on how these principles are applied to specific types of Workshops while also sharing various challenges and successes we have experienced to help guide you in your Governance Efforts.

Governing Partnership Collaboration

Dana Berg — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:46:00 GMT

So maybe you've decided that it's now time to expand your SharePoint service to support partnership collaboration. If so, a common architectural design for this use case is to build out a dedicated SharePoint farm on your company's extranet/DMZ. While this design aligns to architectural best practices, it often presents a few user experience challenges for your internal knowledge workers. The SharePoint Governance Kit has been designed specifically for this use case and has been built to govern mutli-farm environments, Here are some of the benefits it provides in this scenario:

Intelligent & Centralized Provisioning into Either your Intranet or Extranet SP Farm
Through the online provisioning wizard, users can be asked several questions during the site request process. Depending upon their answers, the SharePoint Governance Kit will determine if the site should belong on the intranet or extranet farm. Users no longer need to burden themselves with understanding the underlying architectural design of the environment and can just fill out the request form when they need to collaborate.
Topical Based Site Directory (across SP Farms)
Suppose I am a knowledge worker that is on a project team working on "Product ABC". This project team has several SharePoint sites that support the development of "Product ABC", some of those sites are internal and some of those sites are on the extranet supporting collaboration with vendors doing work on "Product ABC". We often hear knowledge workers saying "I wish I could simply get a view of all sites related to 'Product ABC' independent of where they are located physically". Well, the SharePoint Governance Kit meets this need via the management of site metadata and the availability of a mulit-farm site directory. This site directory allows users to navigate, search and/or facet on any topics/metadata captured about any site across your company's SP ecosystem.
Partner Identity Onboarding
Every company has a slightly different approach for onboarding a partner/vendor and granting them access to IT services. Since SharePoint is often used in partner collaboration scenarios, the request for a collaboration site is often done in parrallel with the need to setup partner identies. Consider the use of the Site Provisioning wizard to help out with this process. For example, one question that could be asked at the time of the site request could be "Do you need to setup a partner account for use on the collaboration site you are requesting?". The response to this question could trigger a notification to the identity management group for fullfillment of that request. Or, some organizations may want to automate this process through additional customization of the wizard that automatically creates accounts in the partner AD instance. In either case, the provisioning wizard is a great place to capture all of the business user's requests that will support their partnership collaboration.

Your Compliance Assessment of SharePoint

Dana Berg — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 02:24:00 GMT

Many of our customers within life sciences are concerned about how to perform their regulatory compliance assessment of the MOSS platform. For those not familiar to the wonderful world of system validation, compliance assessments are typcially performed within life sicences to help determine whether or not a computer related system falls under any agency regulations (e.g. GxP, SEC, etc..). The process of determing a system's applicability to things like GxP and SOX has traditionally been at the application-wide level. For document management and lab information management systems, this process of identiying the intended use cases, assessing risk of those, and making an appropriate quality classification has been largely straight forward.

Then comes along Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)! Most of our customers have a vision for MOSS that is larger than any one application and/or any 1-set of use cases, but rather provides capabilities and tools that could be applicable to almost any business unit/use case within the company. With that in mind, service owners always find themselves scratching their heads on the various options they have when deciding how best to make their compliance assessment for such a broad solution. The following provides some of the options we have seen traditionally employed and some newer ideas in this area by usage of our SharePoint Governance Kit.

Two Distinct Instances of MOSS (1 non-validated, 1 validated)
This approach provides a clear distinction between the MOSS farms that intend to be used for supporting regulated use case, done typically by partitioning the validated instance of MOSS onto a seperate farm (often with its own hardware). In this scenario, service owners have the benefit of a clear picture of which SharePoint sites may have information that are under a paritcular regulation, and which do not. In some organizations, that may also provide the benefit of streamlined change control process for the non-validated instance. However, there are several cons to this approach. Multiple environments typically lead to an increase in support and maintance consts. Additionally, the user experience for the knowledge worker then becomes scattered across multiple farms.

Qualify MOSS as a Platform and Implement Validated Solutions (if needed) on Top
Probably the most common approach that we see today. This scenario essentially views SharePoint as an underlying platform (not really a single application). Almost as if you would handle the qualification of an operating system or SQL. The compliance assessment in this approach basically states "All of the potential intended use cases for this platform can not be envisioned or identified up front, however to not preclude the usage of this platform for such scenarios, the environment with be 'Qualified' with sound software development processes such that when such a regulated use case would like to onbaord the service, it can leverage the foundational platform". Often in this scenario, validated line-of-business solutions are built from the qualified platform and the deployment of that specfic set of use cases may need specific documentation/validation.

Combine either #1 or #2 with the SharePoint Governance Kit and Request Knowledge Workers to Perform a Small Compliance Assessment at the Time of Provisioning a Site
Another new approach that we are beginning to see with the introduction of the SharePoint Governance Kit, is the process of asking knowledge workers/site owners some questions at that time they request a collaboration site. Such questions that may be asked by our online provisioning wizard could be:

"Do you envision the site that you are requesting to be a location where users will create, modify or maintain electronic records required by a predicate rule?"

"Thinking about how you expect to use the site you are requesting, please specify the risk level that you perceive this collaboration site to be -
       (A) Low Risk - No content within this site would not be considered during a regualtory inspection
       (B) Medium Risk - The site may contain electronic records, however content is always verified before decisions are made that could affect patient safety
       (C) High Risk - Data managed in this site could directly affect patient life

With the SharePoint Governance Kit, corporate policies could be enforced in different ways depending upon the knowledge workers response to such questions. The action the solution would take would also be dependent upon a customers philosophy on corporate compliance and their underlying compliance assessment/architecture of the MOSS platform.

For example, if a customer had an architecture similar to the one described in #1 above, if a knowledge worker requested a "high risk" site, the governance kit could automatically route the request to a compliance representative and once approved, could automatically provision that site into the "Validated" SharePoint instance. Similarly, if an end user was trying to request a "low risk" site, an organization may want to allow the Governance Kit to immediately provision the site (with no approvals required) directly within the non-validated instance.

If a customer had an architecture similar to #2, the Governance Kit could perform the same types of approvals as required, but possibly create that site into a known Site Collection that has users trained on the appropriate SOPs for management of such content.

There are a dozen other ways (not described above) that we have seen clients use the site provisioning capabilities found in the SharePoint Governance Kit for helping them control compliance of the information in MOSS and if you have any questions, would invite you post here on this blog and/or reach out to us here at speakTECH.

In my next blog, I will expand upon the Site Provisioning capabilities available in the SharePoint Governance Kit and how it specifically can help Pharma's automate the creation of collaboration spaces for partners (like CROs) in extranet scenarios.

SharePoint Governance Analytics and Scorecards

Stephen Roos — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:23:00 GMT

Given the wide range of functionality that the SharePoint Governance Kit provides, it has become increasingly necessary to develop and include a set of powerful reporting tools and analytics that can be used to monitor and analyze he performance of the system. Some of the reports currently in development are:

Site Creation Statistics:
- How many sites have been created (per month, total)?
- How quickly (turnaround time) are sites in each area approved for creation?
- How many outstanding approvals are there (per month)?
Quota Management Statistics:
- What percentage of sites are below quota, in the warning zone, and above quote (pie chart)?
- How long are sites typically over quota before bringing their site size down?
Usage Management Statistics:
- Which organizations contain the least-frequently used sites?
- What portion of unused sites have been archived from the system?
- How long does it usually take for an unused site to be archived?

With these (and other) metrics, we can provide a Governance Scorecard that will give the system owners and administrators an idea as to how effectively they are implementing their governance program. The Governance Scorecard will also be able to give specific advise for how to improve in areas where governance is deficient. Stay tuned for updates on this set of functionality!

K12 Education Governance Template

Aaron Sloman — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

We are close to releasing our K12 Template for the SharePoint Governance Kit. We have been working with a number of school districts, understanding the way the students and teachers want to make SharePoint more flexible, incorporating our on-demand provisioning and dynamic site directory. This has helped us refine our information architecture considerations and metadata model. The metadata model is looking pretty portable across districts. We will post some diagrams shortly, showing some best practices, to address:

District \ School relationships
School \ Grade \ Class relationships
Student to Class / Club / Group relationships
Student to Student relationships

Something that’s been very popular is the ability for Students to provision their own sites for Clubs, Teams and Groups. This has enabled “On Demand” collaboration, inside the District’s governance policy.

One of the items we are close to releasing is the automated provisioning tool, to build out the information architecture based on the student / class register data file at the start of the school year.

Watch this space, and if you have an information architecture you have deployed at a school, feel free to post it here !

Bridging On Premise and Partner/Microsoft Hosted SharePoint Farms

Aaron Sloman — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 05:31:00 GMT

There's lots of positive momentum around services like Microsoft BPOS and Microsoft Online, as well as Partner hosted solutions. One of the challenges presented, is that one size does not usually fit all.

Given our SharePoint Governance kit was designed to work cross server farms (to address common scenario’s like Extranet / Internet deployments, or Global Enterprise), we fortunately can support the bridging of On Premise SharePoint with Hosted SharePoint.

What's unique about this, is that using the Governance Kit, the physical location of SharePoint farm is transparent to the end user. Based on the provisioning rules, the user's site will be placed in the correct farm and namespace based on the governance model. But the site directory and team sites navigation menu will show these sites for the user to access, just like any other SharePoint site.

But one consideration, is that currently this will only work for BPOS dedicated or Partner hosted, where we can install the Governance Kit as BPOS Standard does not allow 3rd party software to be installed.
Are you looking at hybrid models, with SharePoint farms being located on premise, and hosted data centers from Partners or Microsoft ?

Welcome to the SharePoint Governance Kit blog

Mack Reed — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:29:00 GMT

speakTECH Labs has developed SharePoint Governance Kit to help you gain complete, customizable control of your installation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

We'll keep you posted here on the latest builds, upcoming features and tips and tricks for using this powerful toolset.

If you have questions about how to use your installation of SharePoint Governance Kit, check out the Forums