SharePoint Administration | SharePoint Migration

Scaling SharePoint through Governance

  

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SharePoint has become a critical business platform within most organizations, and yet many companies struggle with making SharePoint scale to meet their growing end user demands. As SharePoint grows (more users, more business scenarios addressed, more solutions deployed), it becomes more complex. Administrators are looking for best practices, trying to learn from the rest of the community. More and more organizations are thinking about governance as a way to help them to get their environments under control and to help them scale.

Some of these best practices are unique to SharePoint, most can be applied to any enterprise application. In our experience, adherence to five key focus areas will help companies get their SharePoint environments under control, allowing them to get the most value out of their SharePoint investments.

While it is advised that any new SharePoint deployment include a sound governance strategy, the reality is that most governance plans happen mid-stream.  The following focus areas can be applied for new and belated governance strategies:

1. Policies and Procedures
   This is what most people think about when it comes to governance -- the tactical areas of managing SharePoint, such as setting (and cleaning up) permissions, creating site and content creation rules, organizing site and metadata taxonomy structure and management, and managing alerts.

2. Centralized versus Decentralized
   Most organizations need to manage policies and procedures at different levels -- at the site, site collection, farm, and multi-farm level. An important part of a governance strategy involves decisions around accountability, and knowing where these policies and procedures are managed.

3. Roles and Responsibilities
   Another important aspect of a strong governance strategy is having a clear definition of roles and responsibilities -- knowing what is expected at each level, and where to escalate. The hard part is managing who does what, knowing where their roles are being managed (Active Directory or SharePoint groups), and making changes in a timely manner.

4. Execution and Iteration
   As with any enterprise application, deployment of SharePoint is an iterative process with adjustments made as you learn and as your requirements change. Likewise, your governance strategy will change as your SharePoint environment changes, impacting the ways in which you track, measure, and automate.

5. Communication Strategy
   A healthy part of any governance model should be a strong communication strategy, which will help to get people involved, to keep them abreast of what is happening, and to give them data on what has happened.

Over the next few weeks, we'll explore each of these key focus area in greater details and show you how Axceler's ControlPoint can help your team quickly take control and better manage your governance strategy. For more information about ControlPoint, you can review our datasheet, or register to attend a live demo.