DevConnections - SharePoint Governance
We just finished up a great session by Shane Young on SharePoint Governance. Shane had a lot of great advice about managing your deployments in a SharePoint farm.
Some of the important issues he mentioned were the overall need to define a success strategy. We couldn't agree more. SharePoint is designed to be a clean slate, it doesn't decide how your business, process, or application should run. Success should be determined before the project ever starts; learn what your business goals are first and plan your path to meet them in your SharePoint envrionment.
He also talked extensively about setting your parameters up front. This means you need to decide how to roll out your farm, what the configuration and information architecture looks like, then lock down the places that need to be secure and managed. We define some of these items by deciding in advance about which logical areas of our Site Collections have specific quotas, blocking of certain file types, information management policies, etc.
Shane also mentioned some of the great products currently under development for SharePoint on CodePlex. We have found this site to be a great source of community-driven templates, code, and ideas to help further the usability of SharePoint. Specifically he pointed towards the governance section at: http://codeplex.com/governance . But there is plenty more SharePoint-based projects on CodePlex we would recommend. On of the more interesting items he mentioned was the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 tool found here: http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3830
-Ryan