SharePoint 2010 For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 31

Ten Governance Items

Governance has gotten kind of a bad rap in part because of its association with the banking scandals of recent years. People hear the word and get all squirrely and anxious, especially when someone proposes governance that affects them. But a well-crafted website governance plan isn’t about restricting people; in fact, it contains just enough detail to ensure a certain level of consistency and oversight. Website governance is about the people, policies, and processes that craft your site. Your governance helps you figure out how to apply all the boffo new SharePoint features you can read about in this book.

In this chapter, I show you ten things that influence how you think about your SharePoint governance.

Failure Is Not an Option (Neither Is Looking Away and Whistling)

One of Microsoft’s key SharePoint product drivers was the goal to put more control and configuration in the hands of the users; SharePoint was designed to be The Platform of the People.

And people, as you’ve probably noticed, tend to be unpredictable. So SharePoint + Human Nature = Chaos. Sooner or later, an uncontrolled proliferation of sites and subsites, ways of doing things, ways of tagging and applying metadata, and ways of managing documents will produce a very unwieldy SharePoint installation indeed. Trying to identify and implement governance at that point can be an exercise in frustration.

This is a long way of saying that you’ll have to address governance sooner or later. ...