Chapter 13
Site Governance
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- More SharePoint Designer Custom Activities
- Creating and Installing Timer Jobs
This chapter describes how to implement a site governance solution (sometimes called a site life cycle management solution). It begins by defining governance (an important subject in SharePoint) and then explains the “site” part of “site governance.” In short, it describes how to create an automated process that enables end users to request and automatically create sites with a defined purpose and lifetime. As you’ll see in the chapter, this goes far beyond SharePoint’s “self service” features.
This highly technical chapter builds upon the previous chapter’s introduction to custom activities. You build a new, more complex custom activity to support site governance.
Site governance provides value to end users and IT management alike. End users request new sites by way of an online form. SharePoint Designer workflow can use the custom activity to create a new site. First, however, it uses an interesting security trick to decide whether the user should be granted the site automatically or if an IT administrator must first approve the request.
Lastly, the solution introduces a new platform feature: the timer job. The timer job ensures that sites are properly disposed of over time and takes responsibility for implementing reminders.
The problem is now defined in greater detail.
WHAT IS SITE GOVERNANCE?
Before discussing the “site” in site governance, consider ...
