From one perspective, almost any act of creation, deletion, or editing on a SharePoint site can be seen as a part of managing site content. The area of management covered specifically by this chapter is the more strategic, higher-level approach to all of those other pieces of site interaction you learn about in detail in the other chapters of this book.

In this chapter, you learned how identifying the purpose of your site is critical to effectively planning its architecture. You learned how to safely experiment with all the SharePoint tools that you’ve learned about already and will continue to learn about throughout the rest of the book. Visualizations of site content are useful not just at the beginning of a new site content project. You can revisit and refactor your site’s layout and organization at any point in time. When the users of your site could benefit from better organization, look to prototypes, wireframe diagrams, storyboards, and card sorting to help put the pieces in place.

Governance is a hot topic these days in many organizations using or planning to use SharePoint. SharePoint has fulfilled Microsoft’s vision and empowered the members of the organizations who have implemented it. In many organizations—maybe in yours—SharePoint users have been creating and filling SharePoint sites for years. With so much content sprawl, the shared principles of fellow users must now be considered if they weren’t at the initial implementation of the product. Thus, you learned what governance is and how you and your organization can benefit from it. You learned some governance strategies for different types of site audiences and taking advantage of search for governance.

By all means, use the wealth of references presented in this chapter to follow up on the topic of governance. Take advantage of the excellent free electronic books and posters that Microsoft has published on the Internet on the topics of planning and governance. Microsoft has learned from its customers, partners, and its internal implementations of SharePoint. If you’ve looked for information on governance published for previous versions of SharePoint, you wouldn’t have found the breadth of resources available now. Microsoft has produced quality information that will help any organization to more effectively harness the spread of information across SharePoint sites.

Managing content for Internet sites is a practical example of IA and governance. SharePoint is an effective tool for creating a public Internet presence for your organization. However, when you open the doors of your site to the general public, make sure that the proper controls are in place. Like any public space, proper manners are common, but vandalism can happen. Use the anonymous permissions settings to open your site at the right level. Consider the availability of SharePoint Server which has specific features for publishing information to broad audiences. As you’ll find throughout this book, SharePoint Foundation often is a starting point. Once your needs go beyond the basics for Internet sites available in this edition of the product, you might find your sites benefitting from the additional features of the next step up in the product, SharePoint Server.

As you read the remaining chapters of this book, you will pick up even more advanced ways you can interact with the content of your sites. Using what you learn, you will extend sites and customize them to meet your needs and the needs of the consumers of your sites. Whether you are adding content from external data sources or adding automated workflows to content creation, keep in mind the content management strategies and tools introduced in this chapter. Plan, create, and seek agreement for your site content’s use with your fellow participants in your organization’s SharePoint implementation.