About Author

Dorotea Knežević is a Content & Digital

Marketing specialist at SysKit Ltd. Her job
includes creating educative content about
the latest news, trends, and best practices in
the SharePoint and Office 365 world.

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Table of Contents

About Author..................................................................................................................... 1

Initial definitions ............................................................................................................... 4

Myth #1: Business executives and managers should write the plan........................... 5

Myth #2: The SharePoint Governance Plan should be extensive ............................... 5

Myth #3: Once you write the Governance Plan, you can remove it from your to-do
list .................................................................................................................................. 5

Myth #4: The purpose of the SharePoint Governance Plan is to tell people what to
do .................................................................................................................................. 6

Defining Roles and Governance Committee ................................................................... 7

Myth #5: Creating roles to fit the existing team members......................................... 9

Myth #6: Every role should be assigned to a unique person ..................................... 9

Building your SharePoint logical and information architecture .................................... 10

Some examples of logical groups can be:.................................................................. 10

Myth #7: You should follow industry-defined architecture templates ...................... 12

Myth #8: Once you build the architecture, it won’t change ..................................... 12

Myth #9: The more content types, the better ............................................................ 12

Building your site architecture ........................................................................................ 13

Myth #10: You have to fit your needs into one of the SharePoint templates .......... 15

Defining Management Policies ....................................................................................... 16

Myth #11: The more policies, the better ..................................................................... 16

SysKit Security Manager – Permissions Governance Made Easy .................................. 17

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Over the years, a certain mystery has developed concerning
SharePoint governance. But the whole thing is quite simple if
you follow the ground rules and avoid common misconceptions.
In this whitepaper, we wanted to help you by shedding some
light on a few common myths that circulate within SharePoint
communities – have a look!

Initial definitions

A SharePoint Governance Plan is an official guideline for

processes, rules, and regulations of your SharePoint
environment. To put it even more simply, it is a guideline of
how things are done within your SharePoint farms and
Office 365 groups.

Before even starting to write your plan, you should define

your SharePoint goals. “Why are we using SharePoint in the
first place?” “What are we trying to achieve by using
SharePoint?” Knowing the answers is the first step toward
building a good SharePoint Governance Plan.

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Myth #1: Business executives and managers should write
the plan

Not necessarily. The people who have the most knowledge

should write the plan. That’s usually the IT department.

Myth #2: The SharePoint Governance Plan should be

extensive

Not true. The scope of your plan should depend on the size
of your organization, SharePoint environment, your goals
and the number of users. If your SharePoint needs are
basic, and you have a small business, a few simple
guidelines will do the job.

Myth #3: Once you write the Governance plan, you can
delete it from your to-do list

Not true. A SharePoint Governance Plan is a living structure

and it will have to change over time. A Governance plan is
not meant to be put on a shelf as a trophy. It should
constantly be adapted to the needs of your users and your
evolving SharePoint architecture. It’s wise to choose a
format that allows real-time changes from multiple users,
such as a wiki page.

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Myth #4: The purpose of the SharePoint Governance Plan
is to tell people what to do

Not at all. The purpose of the plan is to guide people to use

SharePoint so as to benefit the organization. It’s immensely
important to have all your people understand that.

User adoption and user training are a key to successful

governance. Give your users proper training in SharePoint
products, and keep them in the loop with all the updates
and novelties.

Having a Governance Plan is useless without implementing

user education. Familiarize your users with the policies
through user onboarding and keep them updated about all
changes in your governance. Personal education or a set of
internal newsletters can do that job.

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Defining Roles and Governance Committee

A committee is a group of users who discuss updates to a

SharePoint Governance Plan, suggest SharePoint
improvements, and go over SharePoint-related issues. They
are like a parliament – they have meetings where they
decide what’s best for the entire organization. An effective
committee should have both business and tech-oriented
members. It’s wise to include at least one person from the
HR department, and several IT and upper management
members.

One of the first tasks of the committee is to define specific

SharePoint roles and assign them to people in the
organization. Each role has its own responsibilities. Some of
the most important roles are shown in the table below.

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Role Responsibilities
Farm Admin software and hardware
maintenance for SharePoint and
SQL servers in SharePoint On-
Prem.
Global Administrator all administrative features in the
Office 365 suite.

Operations Manager day-to-day use of SharePoint

by maintaining Central
Administration, optimizing
services, and troubleshooting
issues

Dev Team Leader handles and analyses

company’s SharePoint requests

Site Owner/Admin assigns and revokes

permissions, creates and
manages security

Site Designer manages the look and feel of

sites, sub-sites, lists, and
libraries

Trainer develops a training plan for the

organization

Taxonomist/Information defines site architecture and

architect navigation based on analysis of
the information needs

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Myth #5: Creating roles to fit the existing team members

Don’t try to adapt your roles to your existing team – that’s

not the point. Create the roles that reflect your defined
SharePoint goals and environment structure. If you
currently don’t have enough staff to fill all the roles, it’s OK
to leave them empty until you find the right people to do
them.

Myth #6: Every role should be assigned to a unique person

This is not true. Each person within the organization can fill
more than one role. If a person is competent enough to
carry out the duties of more than one role, there’s no
reason why he or she shouldn’t. Many smaller companies
follow this practice and it works fine for them.

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Building your SharePoint logical and information
architecture

Simply put, a logical architecture is a set of logical groups

that share the same principles, settings, and configurations
in your SharePoint environment. Since SharePoint is such a
complex infrastructure, grouping things inside it makes
implementation of Governance guidelines easier.

Some examples of logical groups can be:

➢ Intranet
➢ My Site

➢ Extranet

➢ Internet

➢ Collaboration
➢ Project

➢ Applications

➢ Search

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Unlike the logical architecture, which is a high-level
structural blueprint of your SharePoint organization,
information architecture is a hierarchical list of content,
search keywords and data types inside your environment.

In other words: information architecture defines how the

information is organized and presented to your users. It
tells you what type of content lies within each level of the
SharePoint hierarchy: your sites, sub-sites, libraries, lists,
and documents.

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Myth #7: You should follow industry-defined architecture
templates

Searching through the vast cyberspace of the Internet,

you’ll stumble upon many expert sites offering information
architecture templates. But there’s no requirement to
blindly follow such advice or to define your architecture just
like everybody else does. The most important piece of
advice we can give you is: know your organization’s goals
and plans and build your own architecture accordingly.

Myth #8: Once you build the architecture, it won’t change

Not true. The information architecture, just like your

SharePoint environment itself, is a live structure that
requires constant adaptation. Moreover, you should build
your information architecture to be scalable. It should be
able to grow and accept new types of content.

Myth #9: The more content types, the better

Surprisingly, this is not true. It is believed that four to five

options are optimal for users. If you give them too many
options, it may lead to user frustration or even errors.

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Building your site architecture

The site is a basic element of a SharePoint framework, and

it’s the place where you put your content. It’s the job of site
designers to build sites upon the requests of their users . To
make your job easier, Microsoft offers a range of site
templates. But you must still choose the right type of
template. Moreover, if you’re not satisfied with the given
options, you can build your own site templates.

Users will usually ask for a team site, since that’s the most
commonly-used template. But that doesn't mean they need
one. Before getting deep into building your site, ask your
users a set of questions to find out their real needs. This
process is called site planning.

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Usually, designers ask these types of questions:

➢ What will the site be used for?

➢ Collaboration
➢ Project
➢ Community
➢ Publications

➢ Who will use it?

➢ Who will be the site owner?

➢ For how long will you need it?

➢ What type of documents will you be working on?

As important as this process is, you don’t need to put it in

the Governance Plan and shouldn’t do so. The thinking
process behind the final decision is not something that a
regular user needs to know. Keep it simple.

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Myth #10: You have to fit your needs into one of the
SharePoint templates

SharePoint templates serve only as a framework of how you

can build your site, if you so choose. But you can also
create your own template if predefined templates don’t suit
your needs. When it comes to creating customized
templates, knowing your users’ real needs is half the job
done. That’s why an elaborated site planning process
comes in handy.

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Defining Management Policies

Management policies are set of rules that tell admins, site

owners, designers, and developers what they should and
shouldn’t do. In your management policies, you should
define how you would structure, manage, and access your
content.
You should definitely include basic policies such as:

➢ Site owner guidelines

➢ Site hierarchy conventions

➢ External sharing guidelines

➢ Security and permissions standards

➢ Site retention and deletion policies

But don’t overdo it – keep things simple. Bear in mind that

not all your users are tech-savvy, so don’t go overboard
with the tech details.

Myth #11: The more policies, the better

The reverse is true. Keeping the number of policies to a

minimum is better. It’s easier for users to remember and
understand fewer rules.

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SysKit Security Manager – Permissions
Governance Made Easy

One of the key parts of your governance should be your

permissions management strategy. Poorly managed
SharePoint permissions can lead to data breaches and
millions of dollars of costs. We in SysKit have developed the
perfect tool to alleviate your permissions worries. SysKit
Security Manager is an all-in-one permissions management
tool that helps you to:

✓ View all principals and their

permissions.
✓ Check all SharePoint
and AD security groups.
✓ Gain an understanding
of permission inheritance.
✓ Detect all items with unique
permissions.
✓ Report on external sharing.

Give it a try with our 30-day free trial!

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