SharePoint Governance: Policies

This is the 2^nd post of a three blog series we’re running on SharePoint Governance. If you missed our first post, Governance is the set of roles, responsibilities, and processes that you put in place to guide the development and use of a solution based on SharePoint.

For this post, we are going to delve into policies. Don’t go running off just yet! We know policies can get to be headaches, especially if it requires pages and pages of reading. But SharePoint policies are essential in a successful deployment of SharePoint. Trust us; you won’t be sorry you kept reading.

SharePoint policies define company fundamentals, such as what site owners and developers should or shouldn’t do. Policies typically include items such as what can or cannot be posted, how security must be managed, and developer change-control mandates. Following are some of the policy decisions that will frame your governance plan and form the specific basis of your roles and responsibilities definitions:

• At what level does the company enable self-service? Can users create their own sites or are they IT-provisioned? When does IT perform actions on behalf of users?
• What quota should be allowed?
• How will data or sites be expired?
• What customizations/development will the company allow?
• Can users modify web parts on team sites? Can they modify web parts on pages that are part of the corporate intranet publishing portal?
• Who is allowed to set up or request site-wide content types or site columns? How much central control do you want to have over the values in site columns?
• What is the right way to add permissions? By user? AD group? SharePoint group?

That wasn’t too bad, right?? If you missed our first post on Roles and Responsibilities, please check it out and stay tuned for our final blog of the Governance series. As always, contact us if you have any questions about SharePoint Governance. As Microsoft SharePoint experts, our team members at CoreBix are equipped with unique fields of expertise.

By Robert Jumblatt of CoreBix, Washington, DC Microsoft SharePoint Solutions Experts