How to Measure Success in SharePoint

The following are some items to consider to measure that SharePoint is successful:

•       End-users understand the capabilities of the platform and are well trained to use them

•       New sites and applications are systematically introduced with quick time-to-market leveraging site templates, compliant with standards which follow approved corporate branding

•       Governance teams review and proactively act based on the usage data and business needs

•       Business users are aware of the security model and help to enforce

•       Service-level agreements (SLAs) are in place, platform performance is good, and any custom coding and enhancements are well tested

•       The growth of the server farms, servers, and storage is planned out to be scalable as the business needs

•       Operational costs are in line with business value delivered by the platform

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Building and Evolving SharePoint Governance

The following are some points to take on while building the phases of a SharePoint Governance plan:

•       Initial work stream should focus on:

- Addressing major areas of operations, support and development activity

- Mitigate key immediate risks

- Establish the right organizational structure and ownership is key (people aspect)

- Develop foundation of governance polices, standards and a compliance process

•       Leverage existing processes and teams

•       Bring in new teams only to help with gaps in the organization

•       Realize that the governance document or wiki is a living document and will change with the business

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SharePoint Governance Phases

The following are three key phases to utilize when putting together a SharePoint governance planned approach:

•       Phase 1 – Plan and Initiate

•       Establish appropriate teams and oversight

•       Develop actionable SharePoint strategy aligned with business needs

•       Define initial set of policies & standards with focus on short term pain points

•       Start education and training

•       Implement compliance enforcement processes

•       Phase 2 – Operationalize

•       Integrate policies and standards into day-to-day activities and existing processes

•       Finalize policies and standards

•       Continue oversight, education and training

•       Automate compliance where possible

•       Phase 3 – Mature as needed

•       Review progress and results

•       Mature policies, standards and processes

 

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Key Contents of a SharePoint Governance Plan

The following are some items to make sure a SharePoint governance plan accounts for:

·         Vision

·         Key Roles and Responsibilities

·         Information Governance Policies

·         Operations and Support Governance Policies

·         Development Governance Policies

·         Security Policies

·         Training Plan

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Gaps and opportunities in SharePoint

The following are some key and core gaps and opportunities that are common within many SharePoint environment:

•       Lack of business focus

•       Lack of formalized support structure for SharePoint

•       Lack of scalability of the architecture

•       Lack of evaluating business risks around content stored in SharePoint

•       Lack of an information management records and taxonomy management policy

•       Lack of appropriate service level agreement for SharePoint

•       Lack of high availability and a disaster recovery strategy

•       Lack of a monitoring strategy

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User Centered Design (UCID) Methodology

To have a focus on end users throughout a SharePoint project – the UCID is sometimes utilized.

The methodology includes four stages and both developer/designers and end users are engaged and work together at each step:

Research concept and plan – at this stage getting the user and compatibility requirements is done.

Design prototype – via a white board or wireframe – an actual working prototype is built – because most end users are visual.

Define branding – what are the color schemes and logo to be utilized.

Develop, launch and test – the prototype is developed then put into production and tested for general usability and accessibility.

Odd SharePoint Terms

The following are some odd SharePoint terms that some newbies and even intermediate level SharePoint users – need to know about:

Breadcrumb – a set of hyperlinks that show the path from the home page of a site to the current page one is on – example:

Custom actions – an extension to the user interface, via a command button on the ribbon, a link on the site settings page or a command on the list item menu – actions may also appear based on permissions – example (in this case one won’t see the Site settings unless they have the proper owner permissions):

 

External content type (ECT)
– data stored in an external data source such as SQL Server, Oracle, external data source. This data can be consumed by SharePoint. The selection box for a External Content Type looks as such:

Feature – allows one to activate/deactivate functionality in a site, site collection, web application or farm – example: