MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Developing a Plan for Governance 12-31
Documenting and Communicating the Governance Plan

Key Points
Successful governance is an iterative process, so your governance committee
should conduct regular meetings to:
• Consider incorporating any new requirements into the governance plan.
• Reevaluate and adjust governance principles and standards to meet new
guidelines or regulatory requirements.
• Resolve conflicts among business divisions for IT resources.

The committee should update its executive sponsors with regular reports. This will
promote accountability and help enforce compliance across the enterprise.
Documenting Your Plan
If you are documenting your governance plan for the first time, you will find it
valuable to distribute the work that is required to document the details of your
governance plan among key members of the governance committee. Then, do the
following:
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
12-32 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
• Before you begin to draft the actual governance plan, use the vision statement
that you established as a foundation for your governance plan to identify the
basic governance principles.
• Meet with governance committee members who have the appropriate expertise
to draft sections that address how you want to manage the various aspects of
your environment.
• Review each major component of your plan with sponsors, stakeholders, and
other governance committee members to ensure that you agree about the
major components of the plan: vision, roles and responsibilities, guiding
principles, and key policy decisions.

As you develop your governance plan, think about how users will utilize and
internalize the contents of your plan. Also, think about the length of your
documentation. These planning documents can easily become lengthy, and the
longer they are, the harder it is for users to absorb them. Try to ensure that your
plan is as succinct as possible because this will make it easier for your users to
understand and follow its principles and standards.
Although you prepare a governance plan before the implementation of your
solution, you must not think of it as being finished at any point. Your governance
plan should be an ongoing, flexible, live document. As your SharePoint Server
2010 environment develops, you should return to your governance plan to adapt
to the changing needs of both the organization and your users.
Communicating Your Plan
Communicating the body of the governance plan is a central element of planning
the implementation and continuing management of your SharePoint Server 2010
environment. The main audiences for the governance plan are your key business
stakeholders and the end users who create and consume the site content.
However, you should communicate the goals and contents of your governance
plan to everyone in the organization because all users can create some form of
content by using the SharePoint Server 2010 social computing features such as
tagging and ratings.
One simple way to communicate the details of your governance plan to everyone
in the organization is through a centralized governance portal off the intranet
home page.
On this site, you should include sections on topics such as:
• Governance hierarchy.
• Team roles and responsibilities.
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Developing a Plan for Governance 12-33
• Individual roles and responsibilities.

• Operations policies and procedures.
• Application usage policies and procedures.
• How to obtain IT support.
• Site change requests.
• User experience feedback.

Additional Reading
For sample governance plans for SharePoint products and technologies, see

and


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
12-34 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Process of Implementing a Governance Plan

Key Points
To implement a successful plan for governance, you must follow a regimented
process. The following steps provide an example of a process that you can follow
in your organization when you implement your governance plan:
• Build the governance policies:
• Explore examples of governance plan templates and checklists from
available online resources.
• Use any existing policies as a starting point.
• Group the key policy elements of your plan into high-level policy groups
such as security, design, content management, and collaboration.
• Separate the high-level policy groups into subgroups, which then become
your content types.
• Ensure that you assign metadata to the documents that you add to the
subgroups to make them searchable, such as policy name, policy scope,

policy type, review status, and approval data.
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Developing a Plan for Governance 12-35
• Hold an initial policy review:
• Work closely with the relevant business unit to review the policies.
• Conduct meetings with each unit to go through each policy and review
each one in detail. During this phase, you might conclude that you must
delete, create, or modify some policies.
• Edit the policies:
• Make any agreed modifications to the policies after your initial review
meetings.
• Mark each policy as being ready for review by the business unit, and use
versioning to maintain version control of your policy documents.
• Hold a business unit review:
• Use policy scope to provide each business unit with a unique view. This
way, units will only see the policies that apply to them.
• Use online reviews to avoid having to schedule multiple meetings.
• Ask the business units to review and approve their policies.
• Make any final modifications and review the policies again:
• Make further modifications based on the business unit’s online feedback.
• Mark policies as approved and get ready to publish them.
• Publish governance information.
Create a centralized SharePoint Server 2010 governance site, possibly as part
of a central Web support portal. The governance section should contain:
• Governance policies grouped by category and made searchable.
• Governance training information by user role and topic.
• Governance FAQ list.
• Governance guidance and best practices.

Question: Why is it a good idea to hold business unit reviews online?


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
12-36 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Considerations for the Governance Plan

Key Points
There are several things you need to consider when designing your governance
plan, and these include some common pitfalls and best practices.
Pitfalls of Governance Plans
There are several key design and implementation pitfalls that you must avoid when
you develop your governance plan, such as:
• Not defining any policies on what you will allow users to use SharePoint
Server 2010 for.
• Empowering your users without providing them with adequate and
appropriate training.
• Allowing your users to manage their own security when they do not have the
appropriate knowledge and experience.
• Allowing your users to add too many items to a list, causing downgraded
server performance.
• Not planning for scale and growth.
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Developing a Plan for Governance 12-37
• Not providing SharePoint Server 2010 as the focal point for organizational
information and services.
• Not testing the backup and recovery processes and the data integrity.
• Governing your users too much and therefore stifling the dynamic nature of
the business and its SharePoint implementation.

Best Practices for Governance Plans
Keep these best practice suggestions in mind when developing your governance

plan:
• Use your governance plan to ensure quality and relevance of content and to
ensure that all users understand their roles and responsibilities.
• Make sure that you have a governance committee that has a strong supporter
in the role of executive sponsor.
• Keep your governance model as simple as possible while still maintaining its
strength.
• Ensure that you do not make the solution more complex than necessary by
overdesigning it. SharePoint may have a great feature, but that does not
necessarily mean that you need to deploy it, or at least not immediately.
• Ensure that all users with design or Full Control privileges have internalized
your design guiding principles and that content contributors understand your
guiding principles for creating content.
• Think about how you will ensure compliance with your governance plan over
time, particularly for highly visible sites. You might want to perform detailed
monitoring and reviews of some sites, but only perform spot-checks on others.
• An effective governance plan should not need to restrict every move; it should
provide guidance to users to ensure that the implementation of SharePoint
Server 2010 remains effective and dynamic over time.


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
12-38 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Lesson 4
Governance Implementation Features and
Policies in SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 includes several features, capabilities, and built-in policies
that an organization can use to help govern an implementation of SharePoint
Server 2010.

This lesson describes the key IT service, information management, and information
architecture features and policies that you can use to implement your SharePoint
Server 2010 governance plan. It also describes the governance of sandboxed
solutions.

MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Developing a Plan for Governance 12-39
Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
• Describe the key IT service features for implementing governance in
SharePoint Server 2010.
• Describe the key information management features for implementing
governance in SharePoint Server 2010.
• Describe the key information management policies for implementing
governance in SharePoint Server 2010.
• Describe the key information architecture features for implementing
governance in SharePoint Server 2010.
• Describe the governance of sandboxed solutions in SharePoint Server 2010.


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
12-40 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
IT Service Features for Implementing Governance

Key Points
A SharePoint service is an IT service that offers hosted sites and portals based on
SharePoint Server 2010. SharePoint Server 2010 provides several IT service
features that an organization can use to help govern the use of SharePoint Server
2010.
Blocking SharePoint Installations in an Enterprise

You manage SharePoint deployments at the farm level; therefore, a single
SharePoint deployment is unaware of other SharePoint deployments that might
exist in the same enterprise. Administrators need this information to manage and
control all SharePoint deployments in the enterprise. For example, administrators
need to know how many unauthorized deployments might exist in the enterprise.
To help control and prevent unauthorized SharePoint deployments, SharePoint
Server 2010 enables you to block users from installing SharePoint Server 2010 and
related products in your enterprise. In Active Directory® directory service, you
create and configure the following Group Policy object to disable SharePoint
installations: