Effective SharePoint Governance

However, sometimes the limitation is not with the system but with the organization. For example, you may need to have legal approve all portal content before it gets published. If your legal team is busy (isn't everyone?) and you publish a lot of content, this becomes a bottleneck and is impractical. When this happens, the governance plan is perceived as a bureaucracy, stifling productivity and adoption. If you really need to have legal approve all content, address the resource problem.

Keep your Governance Plan Fresh

One of the biggest worries with a governance plan is that it will be written, stored in a binder and left on the top shelf to collect dust. For your governance plan to be your "how-to" guide, it must be kept up to date. Plus, I can guarantee that you'll be off target with your first version. You'll find that you can't enforce parts of it, and guidance in other areas is lacking.

Of course, how people use SharePoint will evolve over time. You'll encounter new and better ways to solve problems. You'll incrementally release new SharePoint features, and updated versions of SharePoint will come out. Business processes will change, requiring you to adjust your policies. Remember that your plan started out small-give your plan the necessary attention so that it grows with you. At a minimum, I would suggest your governance board meet quarterly to revisit and revise as needed.

So, don't fear the governance plan. It should be an intrinsic part of your deployment and operational guides. But don't just take my word for it. Do it for the right reasons. And when you do it, take a good, hard look at your organization to create a plan that will work today and can grow into tomorrow's plan. Your staff works hard already. Give them the guidance and structure that enables them to achieve even greater success.

SharePoint Governance Deployment, Monitoring and Enforcement with DocAve

AvePoint, a proven leader in enterprise-class governance solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, has responded to SharePoint governance challenges with the DocAve Software Platform. DocAve simplifies the deployment, monitoring and enforcement of SharePoint governance policies while enabling centralized or delegated management of SharePoint farms. Organizations can manage development, test and produce farms with ease, as well as govern solution and component deployment with DocAve's application lifecycle management tools.

DocAve Management Solutions for SharePoint simplify the deployment, management and monitoring of content, security and applications with features including:

• Comprehensive reporting to monitor SharePoint usage, storage trends, network activity and governance policy compliance;
• Batch-mode management of SharePoint content, configuration and security to enforce governance policies at any object level;
• Security trimming based on SharePoint permission or administrative role to delegate SharePoint management and policy enforcement; and
• Automated deployment of SharePoint content, customizations, solutions and Web front-end elements to synchronize development, testing, pre-production and production environments for streamlined application lifecycle management.

DocAve Storage Optimization Solutions for complete SharePoint content lifecycle management allow organizations to:

• Securely offload BLOB content to non-SQL, disk-based storage—based on file extensions or customizable file-size triggers-reducing database size by as much as 95% and optimizing performance;
• Seamlessly present and manage all content residing in any network file share, FTP site or cloud storage directly through SharePoint, providing for transparent management and end-user access and interaction; and
• Offload dormant site collections, sites, lists, libraries and items to progressively lower-tiered storage based on metadata triggers (e.g. "last modified") for business-rule based content lifecycle management.

DocAve Compliance Solutions for SharePoint empower organizations to craft automated, intelligent policies for proactive SharePoint protection, user and content auditing, and records management:

• Scan all content before it is uploaded to SharePoint, verify against customizable keyword dictionaries and quarantine data that does not meet the organization's compliance standards;
• Track and record all SharePoint interactions-including usage, search and security changes-and deliver vital intelligence based on this information to enable better management decisions; and
• Extract SharePoint content and store in an immutable form to assist in the enforcement of retention and compliance policies, providing versatile search across all archived content for legal discovery, audit and review.

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AvePoint is a global technology company and proven software leader. Since its founding in 2001, AvePoint has become one of the world's largest providers of enterprise-class governance solutions for Microsoft SharePoint. Propelled by one of the world's largest SharePoint-exclusive research & development teams, AvePoint helps more than 8,000 customers-including many Fortune 500 companies and government agencies-meet their specific business objectives utilizing the SharePoint platform. AvePoint, Inc. is headquartered and maintains its principle engineering center in Jersey City, NJ, with wholly owned sales and engineering centers in the USA, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and China. AvePoint is a Depth Managed Microsoft Gold Certified Portals and Collaboration Partner and Gold Certified ISV Partner as well as a US Government GSA provider via strategic partnerships.