A SharePoint Governance Plan is simply a set of guidelines to help your business use the platform properly. Unfortunately, nobody gets excited about putting together the Governance Plan. This series of blog posts is designed to demystify the process for you, and make it a lot less painful. This post is part five, and the series is meant to be read in order, so go catch up if you haven’t read the first four posts. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Your SharePoint users shouldn’t be just thrown in the deep end of SharePoint by giving them a username and password, and telling them “have fun!” Instead, they need to be informed of their responsibility when using it, and also trained in how to use it to its maximum potential. The purpose of the SharePoint Governance Plan and the Governance Committee is to make it very simple and clear to employees of your organization about what they can and can’t do in SharePoint. And also to enable them to accomplish what they need to within the parameters of the company’s policies.
End User Agreement
When assigning permission or authority on SharePoint, it’s a good idea also to require agreement from the end user to abide by the guidelines established in the SharePoint Governance Plan. Everyone knows that End User Agreements are boring, so make it simple and clear! The End User Agreement is not meant to be a scary legal document, but just a reminder to the employee of the policies in place, and requiring them to operate within the vision. It is also a good place to give a brief overview of the policies in place.
The Governance Committee should decide and then document the requirements that an end user should agree to when being assigned permissions in SharePoint. This agreement can then be put into a form on SharePoint to make it easily accessible. As a guideline, here are some of the things the agreement should remind the user about:
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Permissions granted: Establish what level of control the user will or won’t have.
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Storage quota: Define how much available storage space is available for document libraries and lists.
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Site retention: State how long the site will be available, and what it’s archival procedure will be after it has reached the expiration date.
It should refer to the SharePoint Governance Guidelines so the user can read the policies before agreeing to them.
Training
Remember, your SharePoint Governance Plan is meant to be as simple as possible, so it is not intended to include training for your employees. But training is critical, so it should outline what training is available (or what needs to be made available), how to access it, and how often it should be updated. Your Governance Committee may want to consider that this role be included as one decided upon during the initial meeting of the Committee. This person would maintain training materials. You can even come up with an internal certification process based on fundamental SharePoint training, and grant permission levels accordingly.
Here at Bit-Wizards, we can create custom training materials (documentation and videos/screencast) for your organization that can be implemented from right within your SharePoint installation!