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!