Many SharePoint deployments find varying levels of sophistication and value attainment across the different parts of the organization. While some departments have a SharePoint “champion” with deep knowledge about best practices and use of SharePoint, others have just cursory knowledge or no SharePoint capability at all.
When it comes to ongoing SharePoint administration and governance, it is often the case that this job falls in the lap of the one IT guy who has the title “SharePoint Administrator” along with many other roles and responsibilities.
If your organization is serious about maintaining a SharePoint deployment at peak level, it is important to define and execute on the following set of SharePoint Managed Services:
- Have in place a plan for governance and site lifecycle management
- Monitor the plan to ensure archival of expired or inactive sites, audit security and permissions on sensitive sites, ensure appropriate use of taxonomy, etc.
- Proactively meet with the business users and map their needs to SharePoint capabilities
- Help the business set up sites that address their collaboration, information management and process automation needs
- Provide ongoing training to department and business function site owners so that they utilize SharePoint according to best practices and in compliance with the organization’s SharePoint governance plan
One of the most challenging components of this effort to maintain a first class SharePoint deployment is enforcing compliance with the plan for site governance and lifecycle management. How does your organization effectively manage site governance policies as they relate to:
- expiration policies
- size limits
- archival of inactive or unused sites
- security and permissions management
- removal of orphaned users
- broken inheritance
- site policy enforcement
and so much more?
SharePoint natively provides some capabilities for administration in these areas but there are many gaps in capability and manageability. As with other areas where SharePoint is found lacking, the third party market has filled the gaps with products that add tremendous value. In the area of SharePoint administration and site governance, we have found that many of our customers use Axceler ControlPoint.
ControlPoint gives you the ability to explore, protect, analyze and control SharePoint by giving you full visibility into your SharePoint environment. ControlPoint gives you powerful control with comprehensive permissions management, move and copy content capabilities, in-depth activity and storage analysis, and the ability to control SharePoint usage with policies. With ControlPoint, you can enforce SharePoint governance automatically, improve the focus of your SharePoint team, avoid security breaches and their associated costs, increase end-user adoption, and reduce the demands on your SharePoint infrastructure and the overall costs of SharePoint ownership.
All too often, organizations that have invested heavily in their SharePoint deployment, find the value of the platform slipping away with time. Keeping a SharePoint deployment operating at peak levels requires a plan for ongoing care and feeding. And investing in the right set of services and tools is critical to the success of such a plan.
For more information on Axceler ControlPoint and/or Abel Solutions SharePoint Managed Services, please contact us.
This month’s SharePoint tip contributed by Kevin Abel, President of Abel Solutions.