SharePoint 2010 provides a rich set of capabilities require clear guidance to both underscore their benefits and realize their potential while maintaining a level of consistency and control within an organization.
This checklist can be used alone to develop your governance plan,as a quick reference guide that accompanies the SharePoint Governance Plan, or as a foundation for your SharePoint governance.
GOVERNANCE PLAN GOALS
- Have a killer backup stratergy that meets the needs of your business and make sure it works before day one.
- End-user training and education in addition to good content and search is the key to end user adoption.
- Have a Governance and Information Management Plan. Branding consistency with a corporate style guide and consistent taxonomy. Make approved master pages available in site galleries for consistency which will inform users they are on the corporate Intranet.
- Enforce workflows and approval on document centers and pages where official documentation comes together. Leverage version history and version control to maintain a history and master document that all can refer to.
- Life cycle managed site collections, and document libraries with information management policies such as content types with auditing and expiration.
- Properly secure corporate assets. Sites with (PII) personally identifiable information should be appropriately flagged and secured and audited.
- A corporate browse and search strategy for the enterprise will ensure you are making the most out of your intranet assets as well as encourage culture change, best practices and adoption.
- Platform Usage Policies and development and test environments ensure only the code you want to introduce follows corporate guidelines and will ensure the environment is supportable and able to maintain SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
- Manage as centrally as possible with a tight team.
- Consistency of platform, browsers, collaboration and enterprise search strategy.
PROJECT AND OPERATION MANAGEMENT
- Communication
- Deployment process
- Change management process
- Cost allocation
- Sponsorship
- Site and platform classification
- Service level agreements
DEVELOPMENT AND CONFIGURATION
- Customization tools
- Site definitions and templates
- Source code and build control
- On-going source code support
- Development standards
- Branding
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
- Ensure understanding of what information architecture is and how it fits in with the Intranet strategy.
- Ensure stakeholders understand why information architecture is critical
- Consider hiring an information architecture professional
- Build wireframes for 4-5 most popular pages (for example, a Home page, a Policies and Procedures page, a Department page, and a Search Results page)
- Design simple sketches for each wireframe (links, content and full functionality to be added later)
- Create a sitemap to plan the overall structure
- Create sitemap subsections for popular groups or departments, then build out lower-level sections, such as Project sites
- Build content types for structured departments, regions, or business site collections.
ENTERPRISE SEARCH
- SearchAssign workflows for content creation so only the best information is available for search indexing. Integrate your taxonomy with search planning Use hit highlighting, best bets, and people search Incorporate alternative content forms such as blogs and Wikis into your search results Utilize BCS functionality in SharePoint to enable search on customer relationship management or partners, products and more
- Search locations Establish content sources to the file based repositories in the organization Use the Business Data Catalog to allow searching of business data.
- Search relevancyDefine who will be responsible for core relevancy settings Implement organizational enhancements of the noise words file, thesaurus file, and keyword best bests.
TAXONOMY GOVERNANCE MODEL
Taxonomy is a structured way of ordering words, labels, tags, etc. for a Web site. It’s similar to a vocabulary list with a set of guidelines for definitions and usage. A taxonomy helps to define and control the way a Web site is organized, what things are named, and how people find information. In short, taxonomy makes it easier to organize and find things on a Web site.
OPERATIONAL CONCERNS- Monitoring
It’s important to monitor at the level of detail that will let you know with confidence that if the site is down that you will be notified there is a problem. You can do this by pinging the server, checking the status of services, testing health-check pages, etc. Failure of the system to respond in the expected way may be a reason to alert administrators or take automated actions to take the server out of the load balancer. Defining what the monitoring policies are, including who will be notified when there is a problem with the server, or with an individual site will eliminate confusion as to who owns the resolution of server problems – including problems with specific sites.
- Disaster recovery and backup
The fundamental building block of disaster recovery plans are backups. Backups of the data, failover hardware, and redundant connectivity. The way that backups are performed is essential to the SharePoint governance process because it establishes expectations on what is recoverable or not. Defining the process for requesting recovery and the timeline for that recovery further establishes the kind of expectations from SharePoint that improve adoption. Be sure to consider a variety of disasters: natural (flood, fire, tornado, earthquake), server (offline, dead), user accidents (file deletion, saving issues, crashes), and site (failure, corruption, error).
- Storage and quotas
Centralized SharePoint platforms must be concerned about total storage. SharePoint can rapidly become the new file storage platform within an organization – and as a result consume massive amounts of storage very quickly. One of the ways to combat this problem is to establish quotas for sites as they are created. Each site is given a small amount of storage and they’re allowed to request more as they need it. The governance process should include the amount of space initially allocated by type of site being provisioned as well as the process for requesting more space.
TESTING & PROVISIONING
- Pre-launch testing
Prior to launching, require site owners to test their own content. Set up schedules for them to review content every other day during the testing cycle. To make it as easy as possible to hear back from these testers, provide an online form or similarly convenient way for site owners to provide feedback during testing. You need to get feedback fast to make changes, so don’t get bogged down in massive spreadsheets.
- Testing plan
It’s best to create test plans that test all necessary functionality, such as links to other programs. Provide site owners with a specific checklist of exactly what functionality you want them to check. If you make the assumption they’ll just know what to do, you may be is appointed with the results.
Building a strong user acceptance testing plan up front will help business stakeholders see for themselves that the project objectives have been met, before the intranet is widely available.
- Test environments
INFRASTRUCTURE
- Firewall best practice
It is a best practice for firewalls to not allow servers to access the web directly. Including content from a third party site through a content editor web part or through the RSS reader web part creates exposure for cross site scripting attacks. Controlling what sites can be linked to from these tools is a security and operational concern. It is typical to prevent outbound web connections from the server on port 80 or 443. This is designed to prevent malicious sites from being run on the server and to make it harder for any potential infection to report back on the infection’s success.
- Load Balancing
Load balancers keep alive pages that they expect to return a standard value to indicate that the server is operational. These pages often are called frequently and have a very low tolerance for a response time. Because of this the load balancers will need to be configured to access a health page. Determining a policy for what goes on this health page and what criteria the load balancer should use to indicate that a server has failed can be essential for high availability applications. Developers must know if they are expected to handle situations where a single session is transferred between servers.
- Defining environments
Defining the environments for development, testing, staging or user acceptance and deploying helps business uses and developers know what resources they have available to test changes without impacting production.
