Organizations can use SharePoint as a tool to empower individuals in new ways through the creation and sharing of web content. Sharing information within an organization is not new, but the publishing mechanism is. Whenever there is change that fosters growth, there is a corresponding challenge to the organization to respond to the change in positive ways. Governance is directly related to managing site content because it is the agreements, written or understood, between the participants in the websites.
How you decide on and document the governance of the SharePoint sites and content in your organization depends on many factors. Microsoft has built many capabilities into SharePoint that can help build strong communities. Understanding the tools at hand will help you better highlight the positive aspects of the SharePoint content for which you are responsible.
Governance comes up as a topic in many SharePoint implementations because the freedoms SharePoint gives to create can result in chaos and unmet expectations when not properly managed. In some ways, a new SharePoint installation can be compared with a wide open frontier. There is freedom and potential, but there is also the potential for lawlessness and failure due to the unknown. In theory, the tools SharePoint gives you are like any other tools you are given to use within your organization. Their use falls under the expectations of professionalism. However, there is potential for abuse and unintentional harm caused by misunderstanding.
Your SharePoint installation is not the Wild West, but it might benefit from some documented agreements on use and operation. As you begin to rely more and more on the servers hosting your content, your dependency on those same servers’ consistent responsiveness and reliability grows. It is in your best interest to look out for the maintenance and upkeep of this resource. It is a given that SharePoint will be used by you and others because of the nature of web collaboration. Governance will help to ensure the shared resources that deliver your information will meet the demand.
Microsoft’s TechNet Library provides guidance on many aspects of SharePoint planning and operations management, including resources on governance. In the article, Governance Overview (SharePoint Server 2010), the following definition is given:
Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that guide, direct, and control how an organization’s business divisions and IT teams cooperate to achieve business goals. A comprehensive governance plan can benefit your organization by:
Streamlining the deployment of products and technologies, such as SharePoint Server 2010.
Helping protect your enterprise from security threats or noncompliance liability.
Helping ensure the best return on your investment in technologies, for example, by enforcing best practices in content management or information architecture.
You might find other definitions that suggest governance is generally applied at a higher level than most management and operations. However, for the purposes of this book, the broader definition given above is sufficient. Including the management and operational implications of a proper governance strategy is important. Not only must the strategy for governance be in place, but the strategy must be implemented effectively and followed up.
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The full TechNet overview of SharePoint governance can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263356.aspx.
If you don’t personally govern your organization, you probably also won’t be solely responsible for setting the strategy and implementation of governance for SharePoint. Organization-wide governance of any resource is usually an executive-level task, incorporating the concerns of all affected parties. However, that isn’t to say that you cannot influence the direction of SharePoint use, management, and operations. As a business user, you have a stake in the outcome of governance decisions. As an advanced user of SharePoint, you might be looked upon as a thought leader in what is sure to be a new initiative within your organization.
TechNet provides some valuable resources for governance planning. The sections that follow contain a review of the highlights of the online material from the advanced user’s perspective. Also included is analysis of the content and suggestions for their use in your work.
SharePoint sites can serve many purposes. You might find it helpful to tailor your governance to the use of the site. In general, the broader the target audience of a site, the more tightly controlled is the content publishing process.
As a modern business professional, you share information electronically as part of your workday. You write emails, author documents, build spreadsheets, and produce slides. When you think about the process of writing a Microsoft Word document, do you feel that you approach the work a little differently than when you are writing an email? Traditional documents stored on your hard disk are hidden from others unless they have access to your computer. SharePoint provides a new opportunity to share and along with that should come a different approach. The opportunity is to securely share information with a broader network of people who you think might benefit from your hard work. And, unlike the network file shares that might be available to you, SharePoint can provide information securely to others beyond your work location without special secure connections like a Virtual Private Network (VPN). When the audience is broadened, your approach to authoring and sharing should and will change.
Consider Figure 8-6. It shows the amount of effort or rigor around the editorial process growing as the audience size grows. This is a visualization of one aspect of a good governance strategy, and it really represents something you do naturally and might consider common sense. You focus your effort where it will have the greatest effect. The width of the pyramid represents the total content at each level of a typical SharePoint installation. Your organization might have some or all of these levels of sites. Generally, the more people in the target audience of one site, the more effort you should consider putting in to the production of the content.
Figure 8-6. Editorial rigor increases as audience size grows. Sometimes, a large amount of content will have a small audience. For example, My Sites overall represent a large amount of content. But each My Site is viewed by only the individual My Site owner. Small audiences like that require and should receive less editorial control.
Audience size and site type are strongly related. Figure 8-7 shows the typical amount of governance in a selection of site types. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but it does closely follow the editorial rigor pyramid of Figure 8-6. A central published site will have more eyeballs on it than a My Site and therefore warrants closer scrutiny.
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Microsoft TechNet includes a number of nice wall poster graphics. You can download the governance model for SharePoint Server 2010 that’s shown in Figure 8-7, along with supporting visualizations and text (for Visio or PDF version) from www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13594.
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There is also a zoomable version of the poster at http://zoom.it/Zb4B. Zoom.it is a free service from Microsoft for viewing and sharing high-resolution imagery. The combination of Microsoft’s DeepZoom, Silverlight, and Azure technologies provide a great in-browser experience for viewing this normally wall-sized poster.
When web content is expected to be read by a large audience, the effect of the content’s quality and compliance with guidelines are magnified. The payoff for care in creating and publishing the content is bigger when the audience is large. Intrinsically, there is an agreement between the publisher and the reader. By broadcasting your message wide and far, you are implying that your material is relevant and appropriate for everyone that the broadcast reaches.
SharePoint supplies a few tools that support a more thorough content creation process. Check-in and check-out help allow edits to be submitted with less conflict between versions. Similarly, revision history provides traceability regarding who added what, and when. And lastly, you can take advantage of minor versions for drafting content before publishing a major version that can be seen by the wider audience.
Going to the other extreme, a personal site might defer all content addition decisions to the individual’s discretion. When the permissions match the use, these types of guidelines can apply to good effect. For example, on a personal site where only one user has access, the same guidelines that apply to personal computer use might apply with slight adjustments, based on storage or network bandwidth needs. When you save a document to your computer’s local storage, only you are affected by the reduction in available space for other new documents. On a SharePoint site, storage is most likely shared. One benefit in a shared space such as this is that storage space can be added without taking apart your personal computer. Another is that if your hard disk fails, your important documents stored online are safe.
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INSIDE OUT Behavior within your organization is governed by written and unwritten agreements with others; behavior on the web is no different in that respect
Many organizations new to SharePoint lack agreements on proper use. If web publishing is a new medium for communication within your organization, managing web content will involve many new experiences. Before you accept responsibility for a SharePoint site, take a minute to assess the agreements—formal or informal—that you’ve made about the site’s use. If you don’t have them already, can you find some agreements with others with little effort? For example, if you have permissions in SharePoint, you could create a new site of any type, including the blog site. A blog can be a great platform for sharing unique, individual viewpoints, including opinion. However, are all others in your organization willing and eager participants in the broad publication of your individual viewpoint? In many organizations, a brief discussion with a manager can help inform these types of governance decisions. Will your manager support, or even better, praise your content publishing efforts? A really good sign could be a performance goal around the type, quality, or quantity of your content creation efforts. Governance takes many forms, but agreed upon performance goals are one example of a method of encouraging content management agreement and compliance.
Search presents opportunities to measure governance and highlight achievements of the shared community of electronic content. If you’ve agreed to present relevant, timely, and appropriate content to others, Search will help reveal how well you’ve delivered on those goals. Some website visitors find information through browsing the site, but many find what they need through Search. In addition to the standard search box and results page, SharePoint Search results can be exposed through Search Web Parts and in custom solutions. SharePoint sites that are shared publicly will also be crawled by public search engines such as Bing and Google. Your document, page, or list item title will be the most prominent wording displayed in search. If you have input on documented governance, you can include tips on creating good titles to help in the discovery of all the valuable web content in your organization’s SharePoint sites.
Search can also expose items that previously were thought hidden from others. New discoveries in old content are common in initial implementations of SharePoint. Out of the box, SharePoint Foundation Search will provide search into the full contents of Office documents stored within a Site Collection. Extending SharePoint Foundation Search to the freely available Search Server Express extends the reach across all Site Collections, into network file shares and to non-SharePoint Foundation websites. While the results are trimmed according to SharePoint Security, incorrect application of security can result in exposing information that might not be appropriate for the full organization. For example, if your Social Security number is contained in documents uploaded to a SharePoint site, you want to ensure that those documents have the proper security settings. While document permissions are important beyond Search, probably no other tool within your organization will provide such broad discovery capability. To comply with corporate governance that likely includes privacy and other compliance required outside of your organization, review of content added to your sites is important. If you make it available to browse, it can be made available to search. And if it’s available to search, all of the text within the content and even some graphics can be exposed to those with permissions to view the content.
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INSIDE OUT Use Search to validate your personal documents before sharing
To use Search to measure compliance of content that hasn’t been exposed by it before, you can set up a test. Would you like to be able to search your files but you can’t guarantee that the information is safe for everyone? You can create a site and break permission inheritance temporarily. After the documents in question are uploaded and the search engine has incorporated them into its index, you can safely search the documents without exposing the contents to everyone else. If over time you become comfortable sharing the whole site with more people, or if searching turns up documents that you would like to share before you become comfortable sharing the entire site, you can upload the individual documents that you’re comfortable sharing to a site with broader permissions.
Any account associated with an email address can be notified of new or changed keyword results through search alerts. To create a new alert, type your keywords into the search box and look for the link “create a search alert.” Search alerts are a great tool for monitoring compliance when your governance agreements contain items that match a specific pattern. For example, if you work for a company that develops and sells Windows Phone 7 Apps, you might add an alert for the keyword iPhone. When reviewing the information shared with that keyword, you might find content that’s not appropriate for general consumption in your company. With the alert, you have access to the item’s location and creator information. You could have the item removed or contact the creator of the item to discuss it.