While Sharepoint is a powerful platform for document sharing, collaboration on projects and work process automation; if you don't manage Sharepoint carefully throughout its useful life,there can be problems. Sharepoint governance sets up policies and regular reviews that protect the data and hardware of the system, set quality standards for custom software and makes sure that web portal content delivers value to the business. Governance is enacted by a broad set of procedures. These procedures, training and auditing make sure that users, developers and administrators will use and manage Sharepoint with best practices whenever they create content, data or new software in the Sharepoint network.

A Sharepoint portal website can be setup by a user in 5 minutes without requiring the new website to follow any business guidelines or content guidelines. Here are some of the problems that can develop without proper Sharepoint governance:

•  Without a content policy to manage Sharepoint, users can create hundreds of personal web pages with no business purpose.
•  Unguided users can also create business and project web pages with duplicate content,create content that violates confidentiality, create content that gives a bad impression to the public or even create materials that can't be backed up and searched.
•  Document libraries are created by default and are easy to populate. If not tagged correctly, document search and manageability can become problems.

Governance, standard procedures and training prevent these problems and increase the business value of your Sharepoint network. Using best practices to manage Sharepoint will ultimately pay off in reduced risk, reduced costs and increased efficiency.

Best Practices Help You Avoid Mistakes in Sharepoint Governance:Beyond content guidelines, Sharepoint provides several areas of functionality, which raises many issues that must be managed for each set of functions. The broad range of Sharepoint capabilities means that to manage Sharepoint requires a large set of policies and checklists. What procedures are needed to wisely manage Sharepoint's Collaboration portals, Document Management Systems, Content Management Systems, Business Intelligence and business process automation? Unbounded Solutions consultants have the experience needed to train your team to manage Sharepoint in all these functional areas. Learning on the job from your Sharepoint governance mistakes can cost too much in terms of content confusion and data loss.

Sharepoint governance policies work to minimize risks and costs while improving the usefulness of your Sharepoint deployment. Governance policies with Sharepoint best practices should start early in your Sharepoint use and should also be used on a regular basis as your Sharepointcontent grows.

A comprehensive governance framework ensures that your portal delivers worthwhile content to your business users. Your Sharepoint governance plan is required to:

•  Avoid organization site, portal site, team site and content sprawl and content duplication. Sharepoint sites can fulfill corporate business goals when we enact consistent content policies and a periodic content and site review process.
•  Protect the Sharepoint infrastructure and user content through backup and disaster recovery policy.
•  Grow the Sharepoint infrastructure when more features or storage are required.
•  Make content searchable and manageable with consistent navigation, taxonomy and search policies.
•  Manage the life cycle of sites and document libraries with information management policies such as content types with auditing, archiving and expiration.
•  Define a deployment process and testing process for both in-house software and vendor provided software.
•  Give users a plan for their web pages, documents, lists, and data that preserves the organization and ability to search the Sharepoint network.

Creating the Sharepoint governance policies that will keep Sharepoint in harmony with your corporate goals can be time consuming because of its wide scope. You will want to include an Unbounded Solutions Sharepoint architect on your site's planning and design team to ensure that your site plans incorporate the information architecture needs of your organization.

Call Today for Answers to Your Sharepoint Governance and Management Questions.

Given the scope and depth of the policies and procedures needed for governance , relying on guidance from our experienced consultants can save you both time and money. Do you have questions on how to protect your Sharepoint deployment with sound Sharepoint governance?



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