SharePoint Manageability and Governance

Over the next couple of months, I'm working on Governance and Manageability.  It's been consuming my life for the past couple of months as well.  It's a big deal.  It's sometimes tough to get your arms around. As far as this topic goes, I'm also working on demos for launch on this topic as well as compliance which comes close to this theme.

Mark Wagner put together a great governance doc he did for a SharePoint customer that blew me away. After looking at it, I felt like any customer that had this type of document would be able to have a very open conversation with the relevant strategy teams, operations teams, business teams, etc... Even the users would have to feel very good about the environment having such "structure" around the SharePoint Deployment.

I wonder how many SharePoint Deployments have been held up due to a lack of corporate "governance" around the SharePoint Deployment.  I've pulled together some examples from customers and some PPT slides which I recently delivered to help "frame" manageability conversations and help frame conversations for the upcoming whitepaper working on.

If you're going to IT Forum in Barcelona, I'll be there.  I have a pre-conference session on Manageability in SharePoint Server 2007.  Obviously I'll have a lot to say.  I'm also putting together slides from this deck to include in my session at Tech Ed South East Asia on Security, Compliance, and Governance in SharePoint 2007.

Without further ado... I've pulled together some great "working" documents and slides with cool never before seen "management" diagrams I've posted to a GotDotNet.com workspace.  One of the reasons I've posted this content to GotDotNet.com is so I can get a handle on the IT Pro projects and tools around manageability which may or may not exist on the web and pull them into a single workspace or at least link to them.

I believe the situation is that central ITs want to have so much control over the environments, the departments or groups feel like they need to have their own environment. What happens is you end up with unmanaged environments when compromises can't be made or the two groups can't come to the same table to work out the differences. When they do, these unmanaged environments need to be "migrated" to either a regional based model or into the central environment with some compromise. This balance of power and managed app vs. shadow app is not a new thing to IT.  This has been happening for YEARS.  It doesn't require a search and destroy app to find the under the desk deployments of SharePoint.  I mentioned Quests discovery tool which seems to do a simple port scan for targetted ports(yep, make sure you have approval from your network folks or whoever cares in your company) then reports back info on these deployments... if you have perms.  Another reason to work with the domain admins and those who care.

Added 8/14... Looks like Quest has posted a white paper on Manageability... The SharePoint Revolution and its Impact on Business and IT and 10 minute SharePoint podcast on their strategy.

I hope you find this post interesting and relevant.