Christian Buckley has two sessions at the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin from the 17th- 20th October. Click here to check out first class programme!

SharePoint has become a critical business platform within most organizations, and yet many companies struggle with making SharePoint scale to meet their growing end user demands. As SharePoint grows (more users, more business scenarios addressed, more solutions deployed), it becomes more complex. Administrators are looking for best practices, trying to learn from the rest of the community. More and more organizations are thinking about governance as a way to help them to get their environments under control and to help them scale.

Some of these best practices are unique to SharePoint, but most can be applied to any enterprise application. In our experience as Microsoft Gold Partners, adherence to five key focus areas will help companies get their SharePoint environments under control, allowing them to get the most value out of their SharePoint investments.

While it is advised that any new SharePoint deployment include a sound governance strategy, the reality is that most governance plans happen mid-stream, which can make deployment and adoption more difficult - but not impossible.  The following focus areas can be applied for new and belated governance strategies:

1. Policies and Procedures
   This is what most people think about when it comes to governance -- the tactical areas of managing SharePoint, such as setting (and cleaning up) permissions, creating site and content creation rules, organizing site and metadata taxonomy structure and management, and managing.
2. Centralized versus Decentralized
   Most organizations need to manage policies and procedures at different levels -- at the site, site collection, farm, and multi-farm level. An important part of a governance strategy involves decisions around accountability, and knowing where these policies and procedures are managed
3. Roles and Responsibilities
   Another important aspect of a strong governance strategy is having a clear definition of roles and responsibilities -- knowing what is expected at each level, and where to escalate. The hard part is managing who does what, knowing where their roles are being managed (Active Directory or SharePoint groups), and making changes in a timely manner
4. Execution and Iteration
   As with any enterprise application, deployment of SharePoint is an iterative process with adjustments made as you learn and as your requirements change. Likewise, your governance strategy will change as your SharePoint environment changes, impacting the ways in which you track, measure, and automate.
5. Communication Strategy
   A healthy part of any governance model should be a strong communication strategy, which will help to get people involved, to keep them abreast of what is happening, and to give them data on what has happened.

The end result of following these strategies is a stronger, more scalable SharePoint environment that will better comply with the growth and changes within your organization. Governance is not something that should be rushed into without proper planning and alignment with broader organizational goals and initiatives. Above all, you must think about the end user impacts of these changes. At the end of the day, a successful SharePoint deployment is one that fulfills both the organizational standards and also the end user expectations.

For more on how Axceler provides support for your governance initiatives, be sure to stop by our booth at the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin, and come see us go head-to-head with the competition in the Administration Tool Shootout! See you there.