TechEd 2008 Session Notes: Creating Portals That Last: Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, Governance and Information Architecture

This is the penultimate in my series of Tech Ed Orlando session notes. It covers a session on governance practices given by Shane Young and Jason Medero.

Goals

1. Prevent content sprawl
2. Drive user adoption
3. Prevent single point of failure
4. Drive efficiency
5. User empowerment

Key Drivers

1. Information Architecture
2. Branding
3. Communication Strategy
4. Enterprise Search
5. Training / UAT
6. Operations Management

Things To Consider

Governance always has to involve the end users.

Use search reporting to decide what content to add / manage. It will illustrate what is being searched for and what can’t be found

Operations Management:

• Monitoring
• Backup/Restore / DR
• Storage and Quotas
• Service Level Agreements
• Reporting
• Deployment Process

Branding: Consistent Look and feel

Communication Strategy: Who, What, Where, When, How

Change Management

Users are like water – they follow the path of least resistance

Dev, Testing, Staging, Prod

Shane says 95% of customers do everything in Production

MOSS allows checking in pages and content

Shane advises customers to use the Dev, Testing, Lifecycle only for custom code

Need a plan for how changes are made

He never lets any custom code into the portal unless it is deployed via a solution

Where do I Start?

• Define roles and responsibilities
• Best Practice: Define success – make it quantifiable and tied to business objectives – usage rate, new functionality rollouts?
• Identify executive sponsors / key stakeholders
• Define taxonomy
• Develop look and feel
• Establish configuration and release management process
• Site provisioning
• Build a service offering
• At what level do I enable self service?
• Where do I want IT to step in?
• What quota should I allow?
• Offering types:
• Unmanaged: Out of box, hard to find, inconsistent experience, difficult to manage & patch
• Managed Decentralized: Easy to access, easier to isolate, distributed admin, challenges: brand, search, browse, support, backup
• Managed Centralized: Easy to index, manage, find information, brand
• Training / UAT
• Put training in the budget
• Quick reference guides for users

What to Expect from an Effective Governance Plan

• Protection against regulatory issues
• Enhance ability to find people and data
• Improve efficiency of your organization