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Governance

Added by Kirk Liemohn, last edited by Kirk Liemohn on Apr 23, 2009  (view change) show comment
Table of Contents

Overview

Governance is a big subject. It can be hard to traverse all of the material out there on Governance. This wiki attempts to make this easier to digest and provides Governance specific guidance for SharePoint.

What is governance?

"Governance the set of processes, procedures, policies, guidelines and tools affecting the way people direct, administer or use a specific IT service within a corporation. IT Service governance defines the relationships among how the many players involved with an IT service work together and how they collectively support the vision/goals originally defined for that service." -Microsoft

Getting Started
1. Gather Requirements
  • Determine what you want to govern and why you want to govern it.
  • Interview the stakeholders (IT and various business units).
2. Educate Yourself
  • Review the Recommended Links and Key Blogs to the right to educate yourself on governance in general and how SharePoint can be governed.
  • Review the SharePoint Governance Features below.
  • Review the Third Party Product further below to see if any meet your needs.
  • If you want to dig some more, review the Further Reading links to the right, but set aside a bit of time.
3. Document Your Governance Plan
  • Determine the outline of your governance plan. Use one of the samples to get started if you like.
  • Make sure your governance plan is prescriptive.
  • Make the governance plan a living document and don't overdo it. If the plan is so big that it is never read, enforced, and used, the effort is wasted.
Recommended Links
Key Blogs
Further Reading

SharePoint Governance Features

Review Governance features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a list of features that are available out-of-the-box (OOTB) with MOSS and for more details on some of these features. To see a comparison of MOSS vs. WSS, see the matrix below.

TODO - review all items with .
Feature MOSS WSS Notes
Site Templates WSS can use Site Templates just as well as MOSS. MOSS does come with more OOTB site templates. The "Site Directory" site template can help manage navigation when there are a lot of sites as well as lock down what types of child sites can be created at any point within the structure .
Quotas Allows you to specify a storage limit in MB per site collection with a warning email going to an admin at a lower threshold. A web application can have a default quota for all site collections created within it. Works with WSS as well as it works for MOSS .
Locks Prevent users from adding content or even viewing a site collection.
Content DB Management Allows you to set the maximum number of site collections per content database. You can specify a warning and limit for the total number of site collections within a content database. You can have one to many content databases per web application.
Individual Site Limit There does not appear to be an OOTB way to set a limit on how many sites you have within MOSS or WSS. See Third Party Products below.
Site Use Confirmation and Deletion Allows you to send warning email when a site is not used within a particular number of days. It can automatically delete the site as well. Not sure if this is a MOSS-only feature or if this is available in WSS.
Auditing Both WSS and MOSS support auditing, but only MOSS comes with an administrative user interface for auditing. See Item-Level Auditing with SharePoint Server 2007 for a discussion on what is out of the box with WSS, what comes with MOSS, and an example of how to expand this further through custom code.
Workflows WSS uses Windows Workflow as MOSS does, but MOSS allows for InfoPath forms running on the server as part of the UI for the workflow. In addition, MOSS comes with extra workflows OOTB such as the Approval, Collect Feedback, Collect Signatures, Disposition Approval, Group Approval, Tranlation Management, and Issue Tracking. WSS only comes with the Three-state workflow OOTB. You can use SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio to create workflows for either WSS or MOSS.
Features The concept of features is available equally in both MOSS and WSS. MOSS comes with more features, however.
Self-service Site Creation Both WSS and MOSS have a simple feature to allow self service site (really site collection) creation within a web application. It is fairly versatile, but would require more strict governance measures be put in place (e.g., quotas).
Records Management WSS can manage records using document libraries, but only MOSS comes with the Records Center template with the ability to send a records from any site collection or farm to a particular records center.
Content Types The concept of content types is available equally in both MOSS and WSS. MOSS provides OOTB content types such as publishing content types.
Content Approval MOSS provides a lot more capability around content approval including publishing approval and the MOSS approval workflow. Both MOSS and WSS allow for versioning which can optionally store draft versions which can be locked down to prevent unauthorized viewing.
Versioning Versioning is available equally in both MOSS and WSS. You can have major versions only or major/minor versions where the minor versions can be locked down to have limited access. The number of major and minor versions can be limited as well.
Site Content and Structure Page Tool for managing the site content and structure. It can be used to view site hierarchy, move content, show all checked out files, etc. Only available in MOSS.
Information Management Policies An extensible set of policies that can be applied to lists/libraries and content types. MOSS comes with auditing, expiration, labeling, and barcode policies OOTB. WSS does not have the information management framework.
Information Rights Management Enables authors to protect Office documents by preventing others from viewing, preventing printing, etc.
Blocked File Types Prevents some file types (extensions) from being uploaded to SharePoint. This is available equally in MOSS and WSS.

Third Party Products

Third Party Description
CodePlex - SharePoint Governance This has a host of free resources/tools that work in both WSS and MOSS (unless otherwise specified). They have been validated internally at Microsoft. Below is a sampling. There are a lot more links at this site as well.
  • Cross Site Configurator - applies settings across multiple site collections
  • Site Delete Capture 1.0 / LE 1.0 - backs up sites when they are deleted to allow them to be restored
  • Life Cycle Management - Notify, backup, then delete unused and unneeded sites
  • Usage Reporting Framework - Reports metrics such as site size tracking, recycle bin used space, etc. _Note that this does queries directly against the databases which is necessarily a recommended approach, but it is apparently used by Microsoft internally. You could probably do a SQL backup/restore and run the tool against the restore, however.
Microsoft - SharePoint MOM Pack  
Quest Software
  • Site Administrator for SharePoint - 30+ reports, custom reports, global policy settings - enforce global policies, Site Discovery - Freeware for finding servers and sites; SQL & Storage Usage reporting
  • Discovery Wizard for SharePoint Freeware
  • Capacity Manager for SQL Server - SharePoint Module - graphically displays content database needs/trends.
SharePoint Solutions
  • Alert Manager 2007 - alert management
  • Extranet Collaboration Manager - very useful tool for managing an extranet (used by ThreeWill's extranet)
  • Site Provisioning Assistant for SharePoint 2007 - can help manage the growth of sites to eliminate bottlenecks for handling new SharePoint site requests
AvePoint
  • SharePoint Administrator
  • Content Manager
  • Compliance Archiver
  • Auditor
iDevFactory Universal SharePoint Manager 2007 - Farm reporting, Central Management Console, site security analyzer, remove accounts, clone account security.
Bamboo Solutions They have a host of portal administration web parts / features.
Nintex Reporting 2008 - Advanced Usage and Activity reporting for SharePoint. Roles based dashboards for business and IT, built on Silverlight
Syntergy Audit for SharePoint (Audit your SharePoint™ and Windows SharePoint™ Services implementation with greater granularity. The Audit Module provides enhanced tracking on documents, folders, sites and other list types. Track document level activity when a document has been viewed, renamed, deleted and all other operations on a file. See what permissions have changed for a site and who granted them.) http://www.syntergy.com/sharepoint/products/current/audit/index.html

Governance Bookmarks

I got a ton of questions during the expo sessions. These set of questions were based on the keynote on 10 Steps to successful deployment. The recordings are available to those registered.
Posted 242 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
Labels: governance
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Describes how SharePoint is set up at Microsoft including multiple farms and regional SSPs.
Posted 314 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes records management features you can use to help your organization meet its regulatory and legal requirements and manage its corporate knowledge.
Posted 336 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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Implementing a records management (RM) solution involves more than simply putting records into a system. It requires that the organization determine what qualifies as a record, when documents will be put in, how they will appear, and when they will be removed. Insufficient retention, or the premature disposition of documents, must be prevented; yet unnecessary retention must also be reduced.
This white paper, authored by Christina Torres, Microsoft corporate records manager, will provide insights into the two key phases of designing an effective records management strategy: developing a solid policy and following up with a smooth, well-planned implementation that will result in a records management program your organization will actually use.

Posted 336 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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I liken a governance plan to a disaster recovery document... the concept is simple but when you start to peal away the layers and actually document things it gets very big.
Posted 339 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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Almost every other customer wanted this information during my visits. I expect you'll find that your more enlightened customers will love these resources. Use it in your discussions and also to enhance your own understanding of SharePoint usage.
Posted 339 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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his page contains tools and resources to help business decision makers and IT professionals govern their SharePoint Products and Technologies environment. Governance is the set of roles, responsibilities, and processes that you put in place in an enterprise to guide the development and use of a solution based on SharePoint. By using the governance techniques and best practices available from this page, an enterprise can align its policies for using SharePoint with its culture and goals while still enabling teams and individuals to effectively collaborate and share information.
Posted 339 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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The SharePoint User Account Control (SPUAC) feature is a collection of Central Administration pages that provides a single view of everything a user can access in the entire farm and an interface to revoke access. SharePoint and nested domain group membership are considered.
Posted 350 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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The objective of this tool is to gather farm related information on environments where Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 is installed. The very purpose of this tool is to help folks in Support understand the topologies deployed in SharePoint environments they troubleshoot. This is not an error reporting tool and does not make any change in the environment.
Posted 361 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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Sharepoint List Security Manager configures who should have Read/Write items for your list/library across your farm.
The utility allows you to set List/Library Read permissions to: a) Everyone b) Only Author
Write permissions to: a) Everyone b) Only Author c) None
Posted 361 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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A command line tool for Enabling or Disabling Content Approval and Versioning on Document Libraries on a small or mass level.
Posted 371 days ago by Kirk Liemohn | View Bookmark Page
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