Governance Kit Developers

Applying Governance to High Tech Manufacturing

2009-02-09T05:53:00Z

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

Governing Partnership Collaboration

2009-02-03T01:46:00Z

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.

SharePoint Governance Analytics and Scorecards

2009-01-16T23:23:00Z

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

2009-01-16T06:00:00Z

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

2009-01-16T05:31:00Z

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

2009-01-12T22:29:00Z

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