SharePoint Governance Starting Point

Microsoft SharePoint™ technologies offer an immense amount of power for an organization, and harnessing and managing its power is the goal of every business that installs SharePoint.

Managing your transition to SharePoint, like managing any project, requires that you consider the risks, costs, and usefulness of the solution once it has been created. In the SharePoint world, this is called governance. We have broken the main parts of governance into project and operational management, development and configuration, infrastructure, operational concerns, education and training, and navigation and search.

One of SharePoint’s most powerful features is its ability to provide outstanding team collaboration. Good planning means assembling a good team, creating a well thought out process, and building in the process of change management. Let’s take a closer look at the ways in which good planning will prepare your team for the transition to SharePoint.

Project and Operational Management
Starting with the big picture helps you determine the big needs and anticipate the smaller ones.

1. Governance Board: Establish a Governance Board that will participate actively in the planning and implementation phases.
2. Roles: Define strategic teams for the initiation of the SharePoint strategy and issues. You may want to consider delegating this task to your Governance Board.
3. Communications: Decide who will communicate the governance plan to your team. Good communication ensures a much smoother experience for everyone involved.
4. Deployment process: Outline the process that your team will use in deploying SharePoint to your platform. Your engineers are an important part of your team; keeping them in the loop will speed the process and ensure a smoother deployment.
5. Change management process: Create the process for tracking, cataloging, and approving changes.
6. Costs: Decide whether you want to allocate deployment costs to separate business units or to the company as a whole.
7. Site classification: Establish the type of use for the site, for example, portal communications, collaboration, or team services facilitation.
8. Service Agreements: Create a service level agreement around the length of time and approvals necessary to create the site, and set up service level agreements for resolving help desk requests.


Development and Configuration
SharePoint technologies significantly blur the line between development and configuration. The solutions you implement will be much more consistent if you consider the differences and essential parts of the governance plan.

SharePoint technologies significantly blur the line between development and configuration. The solutions you implement will be much more consistent if you consider the differences and essential parts of the governance plan.

  • Custom tools: Decide on the type and scope of use of any custom tools that will be needed.
  • Site definitions and templates
  • Establish guidelines for the development of site definitions and mechanisms for coordinating ID usage.
  • Set policies for site template deployment, such as the requirements for a globally installed template.
  • Source code: Decide where you want to house the custom source code and any related documentation and what you want the central repository to contain.
  • Custom tools: Decide on the type and scope of use of any custom tools that will be needed.
  • Site definitions and templates
  • Establish guidelines for the development of site definitions and mechanisms for coordinating ID usage.
  • Set policies for site template deployment, such as the requirements for a globally installed template.
  • Source code: Decide where you want to house the custom source code and any related documentation and what you want the central repository to contain.

    • Operational Concerns: Like any large-scale web environment, configuring your SharePoint environment to use its many powerful components helps keep your system up and running:

  • Monitoring: Set up monitoring for the server and SharePoint sites .
  • Uptime and downtime: Establish predetermined downtimes.
  • Disaster recovery: Create a plan for server and multisite recovery.
  • Quotas: Set up storage limits.
  • Reporting: Define and set up auditing and usage reports.

    • Education and training: Understanding SharePoint’s available features, benefits, and real world solutions can play a big part in the successful adoption of SharePoint in your environment. A collaborative approach to deployment—one that focuses on educating and preparing your team for how SharePoint will be used at your company--ensures a smooth transition and minimizes related risks and costs.

    Finding information (navigation, taxonomy, search): The final set of considerations for your governance plan is about helping users find the information they’re looking for:

  • Site directories: Define the structure of the site directories, including the major groupings and associations.
  • Content types: Define core content types in the organization
  • Define key fields that will be used to link documents and operational systems.
  • Search locations: Establish content sources to your file-based repositories.
  • Search relevancy: Define who will be responsible for core relevancy settings and for managing the noise words file, thesaurus file, and keyword best bets.

    • Contact me for a free consultation.

    Errett CordAuthor Info: Errett Cord is a former excutive of a web hosting firm who has worked with many small- to medium-sized companies developing effective internet strategies. As part of his commitment to helping others improve their businesses, Errett has become deeply involved with Magento, WordPress, SharePoint and how to effectively set up and manage the platform. Contact Errett Cord (ecord@ecord.us)