Best Practices

• Governance includes maintenance of the SharePoint 2010 environment but extends to include policies and procedures, roles and responsibilities, and periodic review to ensure that the myriad SharePoint tools are being used in productive ways that meet the needs of management and end users.

• Any sized organization should have a SharePoint governance plan in place. It doesn’t have to be hundreds of pages long, but should at least be defined from a high level, as suggested in this chapter, with specific roles and responsibilities defined for the tasks that should be performed.

• One key component of the governance plan should focus on the Central Administration site settings that will impact the tools and features made available to the site collection administrators, site administrators, and end users.

• An important subset of the Central Administration site settings are those that apply to the web applications that house the site collections and the service applications that IT chooses to provide to the user community.

• In addition, specific settings for site collections and sites should be governed, to ensure that the right combination of tools is provided to the user community. Just “turning everything on” is generally not an actionable governance plan, because many of the tools are complex to use and administer.

• If SharePoint is to be used for records management, the tools and processes made available by SharePoint should be governed closely.

• The governance plan should be reviewed periodically to ensure that it continues to meet the organization’s requirements and those of the end-user community.