What's your governance plan?

Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that you establish in your enterprise to guide, direct, and control the use of technologies to accomplish business goals.

Two fundamental areas within SharePoint require governance: The IT services that host Office SharePoint Server 2007, and the information management and architecture for your portals and other Office SharePoint Server sites. A governance plan contains a record of your decisions about these areas and drives your deployment of SharePoint Products and Technologies solutions.

We've just published a sample governance plan (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=146768\&clcid=0x409) for a SharePoint collaboration service based on Office SharePoint Server 2007. The plan, written by Joel Oleson, can help you identify key considerations for an IT service implementation.

The following list shows several elements that should be part of your governance plan:

· Lines of ownership for business and technical teams.

· Service delivery requirements for business and IT.

· Customization policy.

· Site management storage and lifecycle policies.

· Education and training plan.

The sample plan provides more detailed descriptions of these and other elements that comprise a comprehensive governance plan.

Our

thanks to Joel Oleson for writing this plan. To find more governance articles and tools, visit our Governance Resource Center.

We know that governance is an area of concern for our IT customers. If you have ideas for governance topics, or want to comment on our existing content, please let me know.

Thank you,

Judy Cowan

Writer, SharePoint Enterprise Solutions UA