Guest Author: Benjamin Curry, SharePoint MVP

So, I’m going straight to the bad practice #2 because of conversations with some peers yesterday here in the UK. We see lots of blogs and articles about SharePoint Governance, and they are all very lengthy and probably applicable to most organizations. But, what I’ve seen is the average SharePoint administrator is the Exchange Admin, firewall admin, and sometimes the accountant! The point is – many folks don’t have time to go through a lengthy governance process. But, we know what kind of trouble they’ll get in without it! So, what’s the answer? I call it ‘Bare Metal Governance"

This is the bare bones necessities you need to cover for a successful SharePoint implementation. It isn’t pretty or well explained, but will get you started in the right direction.

• Item/List/Site Recovery – Who is responsible? How will you back them up? Does it work?
• Versioning – How many? At least one for backup reasons? Who manages this?
• Monitoring – You are monitoring your farm, Web apps, app pools, databases, drives, NICs, zones, firewalls, etc – right?
• Reporting – How are you doing reporting on things like performance and security?
• Developer Customization – How do you control developer customizations and custom code? Solutions? Features? Both? Ad-hoc? (I hope not! the latter!)
• SharePoint Designer Customization – Does everyone have SPD? Is that a good think/
• Windows Server configuration management – Who controls the configuration and change management of the server platforms themselves/
• Server farm configuration management – How many farm admins do you have? Do you trust them? Are they trained?
• SQL Server  - Are you monitoring uptime and performance? Are you using multiple databases where it makes sense? What types of drives do they live on? Are you mirrored/clustered? How do you test patches? What’s autogrow set to for logs and data?
• Themes – Do you control how many / what themes are available in the sites/
• Site Quotas – Do you control how large site collections are? This is the only way to control the 2nd stage of the Recycle Bin, right?
• Navigation consistency – Do you need a consistent navigation story for both global and current? How will you accomplish this consistency?
• Recycle Bin settings – How large is your 1st stage? Who sees it? How large is the 2nd stage? Who manages and restores from the 2nd stage?
• Upload size – What’s your maximum upload size? Why? Will IIS timeout over WANs or sluggish VPNs?
• Site and Site Collection Creation – Who creates Site Collections? Sites? Who can delete them? Manage them? Authorize access?
• How will your users authenticate? Multiple AuthN sources? How will you accomplish that?
• Security – Farm level – Who’s in command? How are you auditing that?
• Security – Site Collection Level – Who controls security for site collections? How are you sure/
• Authorization Mechanism/training – Do people know how to authorize access within your organization. Are they following the proper procedures, like need-to-know or FOUO?
• Search  – Farm/SSP Level config and change management – Who Controls Search management? Don’t get your search management mangled
• Search – Site Collection config and change mgmt. – Who is controlling the end user search experience? Keywords, best bets, Google ads, scopes, etc..
• Document Creation/Publish/Mgmt, etc – How do you control findability keywords? Content types? Consistent metadata? Publication? Approval?
• Metadata management (taxonomy) – What’s your taxonomy look like?
• Content Types – Are your content types truly farm unique? Who defines and manages these?
• Information Management Policies – Who controls and audits your IM Policies?
• IIS Config mgmt. – Are you wathing your IIS configuration management/change management? Are you server admins messing with your IIS configs? Are you backing these up independently?

Myself and others will be talking more about these at the Best Practices conference coming up in Washington D.C. in August.

Guest Author: Benjamin Curry, SharePoint MVP

Ben Curry – (CISSP, MVP) – is a Microsoft MVP and a highly respected enterprise architect specializing in knowledge management and collaboration technologies. As a senior instructor for Mindsharp, Ben shares his knowledge in training courses that cover the next generation of Microsoft products. Ben is the author or co-author of three books for SharePoint products and technologies, including the newly-released Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices by Microsoft Press. Ben has over fifteen years of experience designing, managing, implementing and securing data center IT solutions.

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