Take Control Back - SharePoint Governance
I recently discovered that I’m actually a fireman.
It’s been a while now, that I’m busy putting out small SharePoint fires.
It so happened, that I’m spending the last couple of months helping client solving probems and errors in their SharePoint implementations.
One client didn’t have any permissions’ model. On one hand users reported they can’t access resources. In the other hand, information security personals complained that users have too many permissions. At the end of the day, the system din’t work as expected, and users weren’t serviced.
Another client had a huge database, with astronomical number of sites (and I mean thousands) all on the same content database.
Sounds familiar?
No worries, you’re not alone. Most places I visit, has one or more “SharePoint illness”.
Why does it happen?
As a platform, SharePoint enable the user to do things, he wouldn’t be able to do in a “regular” site.
Starting with content creation and files’ uploads, going through page’s customizations and even sub-sites and folders’ creation.
Just like Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker (Spiderman): “With great power, comes great responsibility” (he’s actually quotes President Roosevelt).
This is where a small plan, called Governance Plan, come into place.
So, what Governance Plan is?
According to Wikipedia, the word Governance comes from an ancient Greek verb which means to steer (or to navigate).
Hence, Governance Plan, is a navigation plan, or navigation principals.
Principals to help us mange various items regarding our organization’s content or knowledge management system.
The most important part of such a plan, is having a vision. Or, knowing exactly where you want to go with your collaboration platform. You can do anything, at the end of the day - nothing is impossible, but the question is “Do we really need it all?”, “Maybe we should concentrate on the most important parts and expand it later?” (and the answer, of course, it “yes” to the second question).
It is important to note and remember, that it is most likely the one plan would not fit all the parts of your organization. It is OK that way. But in this case, the place is not a base for changes. You have to set a basic plan which will be a steady base to all other variation of the plan. Separate your solution into smaller parts (such as Site Collections) appling the specific variation to the specific part.
Take control into your own hands. Implementing Governance in SharePoint 2010
the ability to develop and to customize SharePoint, significantly boosted in 2010’s version of the product.
Starting from better content creation and management, going through the social abilities added to the product, and finishing with the ability to consume and alter data from legacy systems, from within SharePoint.
It appears as power, just got significantly boosted.
But parallel to that, the ability to control that power, increased significantly just as well, and governance options are far more advanced in SharePoint 2010.
As a starter, the granularity of decision is far smaller, and it is on the site’s level now. That means that you can define quotas to for one site, so it can contain huge media files, while the next site is a slim document only site.
SharePoint 2010 introduced the Health Analyzer, which present you detailed information about your farm’s health and status.
you can easily define who is allowed to install SharePoint. Furthermore, using Domain Services Markers, you can collect a list of installed farms, within your organization.
In the next few weeks I will write few posts discussing these options including some how-to guides.
Tech-Ed Israel 2010
I’m going to discuss these issues more thorough in Tech-Ed Eilat 2010, at the end of this month.
I’m going to give, with my friend and colleague Zviki Goldberg, we’re going to discuss test-cases we’ve came across on the field, in real implementations, which are in everyday life of different organizations. We’re going to describe how to avoid such issues, and how SharePoint 2010 helps you with those tasks.
We will also describe how you can, easily, take control back into your own hands.
The lecture aimed for everyone who uses and manages SharePoint in everyday life, but espcially for IT professionals who need tools and method to gain control over the organization’s SharePoint farm.
I’ll be very happy to see you there.
