1. Define a governance framework to provide for ongoing management and maintenance. The framework should specify how IT and compliance will be involved in the implementation, level of risk assessment, and cycles for quality assurance and user acceptance training. Consider the functional capabilities of SharePoint you’ll be deploying and the regulatory environment your organization faces, as both will determine how rigorous your framework should be. If SharePoint will primarily serve as a basic repository to replace shared drives and exchange public folders, your governance challenges are less complex than if you’ll be using Share- Point to manage collaboration on business records or to deliver e-forms to customers. Likewise, governance requirements are greater if you must comply with lengthy regulations.

2. Develop sp ecific policies, procedures, and guidelines for usage. Users need to know how information is to be created, used, and retained within SharePoint, and what information should, and should not be, kept there. Develop SharePoint-specific policies, procedures, and guidelines for different types of content according to how long the content should be retained, whether the content is an official business record, and how accessible the content needs to be. The idea is to implement and enforce policies and procedures that encourage proper storage of information so it can easily be retrieved in the future.

3. Develop a taxonomy. The most critical need for organization of information in any SharePoint implementation is a taxonomy to use as the basis for enterprise-site hierarchy. SharePoint imposes almost no constraints on how users can structure their site collections, which can lead to a mess of repositories that’s impossible to navigate, let alone impose enterprise functions on, such as governance, capacity management, compliance enforcement, and litigation discovery. Your taxonomy should also have defined standards for the location of the top-level site and for placement of site-collection groupings.

4. Identify common solution packages for deployment. Get user groups up and running faster and with less effort by identifying common solution packages. SharePoint’s template functionality allows you to deploy predefined solution packages–fully-developed site templates that meet specific sets of user needs, with relatively little customization. Define your solution packages by first selecting the business activities to be supported by SharePoint, gathering requirements for these business activities, and developing corresponding usage scenarios, then mapping the usage scenarios to SharePoint capabilities to determine the ratio of out-of-the-box functionality to additional functionality required for each. Finally, group into “packages” those usage scenarios that require the same types and levels of functionality.

5. Provide a mechanism for controlled selfprovisioning of SharePoint sites by users. Certain solution packages require less IT involvement to implement than others. A multi-tier provisioning model standardizes delivery of solution packages based on complexity so simpler packages can be provided with little or no IT involvement. The simplest of requests might be handled by users themselves through a self-provisioning program that lets users request solution packages, and then provides those packages with no human intervention. More complex requests might be delivered through a rapid provisioning model that requires the assistance of an IT specialist. The most complex requests, however, would still require either an assisted provisioning model or a traditional software development project.

Joe Shepley and Linda Andrews are consultants with Doculabs, an independent consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations with their enterprise content management strategies. They can be contacted at (312) 433-7793 or info@doculabs.com .

For a detailed discussion of each of the recommendations in this article see Doculabs’ white paper, “Microsoft SharePoint Best Practices: Governance and Adoption Planning,” at www.doculabs.com.