Mitigating the Risks of Collaboration with SharePoint 2013

Good collaboration is essential for any organisation to improve efficiency, drive innovation, save time and ultimately reduce costs. By mixing collaboration with SharePoint technology, processes can be greatly simplified which will return huge cost savings.

Mitigating risks when managing SharePoint Collaboration now comes in many formats including sharing ideas, file/document sharing, knowledge transfer and good old fashioned communication. People can now communication in so many different ways such as phone, instant messaging, web/video conferencing and email.

When thinking about how we collaborate in SharePoint specifically, there are essentially three types of collaboration:

  • Community focused (blogs, social)
  • Content focused (sharing documents, ‘liking’, rating, commenting, etc.)
  • Knowledge focused (finding people with the necessary skills, knowledge and experience)

In SharePoint 2013 you will find a new site template called a Community Site, which provides a forum experience in the SharePoint environment. Communities can be used to categorise and cultivate discussions among a broad group of people across organisations in a company. Communities promote open communication and information exchange by enabling people to share their expertise and seek help from others who have knowledge in specific areas of interest.

SharePoint 2013 has also drastically improved the way that users can collaborate socially. Firstly the new MySite capabilities are a great improvement and you only have to look at Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer last year for $1.2B to see how serious they are taking the social way of working.

These changes also show how collaboration and technology in the enterprise is adapting to a workforce that expects the same experience they get through public social software such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

And it is not just SharePoint. Look at the other collaboration platforms that may ‘pop-up’ within an organisation. Within Axceler we have a number of platforms in use such SharePoint, Yammer, DropBox and SalesForce’s Chatter.

With all these different ways to collaborate it has never been easier to share knowledge, ideas, share documents and communicate both within and outside the organisation. All of the new SharePoint 2013 features are specifically going to drive SharePoint adoption so you are going to see usage grow.

The challenge to IT is that this only increases the risks of information getting into the wrong hands, intellectual property leaks and your organisations reputation damaged.

Your users will also find it more challenging to locate the information that they need with so many different places to collaborate.

To help minimise the risks of increased collaboration, these are some of the things that you should be considering:

  • Define best practices, particularly if there are multiple collaborative platforms in the organisation
  • Ensure sufficient user training so they know these best practices
  • Assess and reprioritise the IT security program’s balance between compliance and protecting secrets
  • Increase visibility of content and collaboration
  • Define a clear governance strategy

Best practices are important so users know when and how SharePoint should be used. If there are other collaboration platforms in place, users need to know which data should be stored within SharePoint and what data should be held elsewhere.

Reviewing security across SharePoint on a regular basis helps to ensure that content does not get into the wrong hands. This should not be simply an exercise in IT; end users also need to get visibility on permissions to their content. For example, when a document is uploaded to a document library, do users truly know who will have access to view it?

By increasing your visibility on how users work with SharePoint and how they collaborate, you can make adjustments and recommendations to those best practices. Ensure you understand what content is being uploaded? Who has access to what within SharePoint? Who is actually accessing the sites?

All this information will then feed into your collaboration governance strategy.

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