Governing the SharePoint 2010 Ecosystem : Governing the Farm

• Site collection creation standards— Important items to cover in governance include which templates will be used, the use of managed paths, and the creation of different content databases for site collections. In addition, the use of site quotas, and their settings, is included. The site collection administrators need to be defined for each site collection and whether self-service site creation will be allowed.

• “Standard” service application standards— For the required service applications, the settings should be reviewed. For example, the Search Service application has a number of settings that need to be configured, such as Content Sources, Crawl Rules, File Types, Authoritative Pages, Federated Locations, and other settings. The User Profile Storage Service application performs a vital role in synching with Active Directory, and has numerous other capabilities that can be configured, such as compiling audiences. Usage and Health Data Collection is generally considered a vital component for IT to manage and monitor farm usage. Some less-familiar service applications like the Secure Store Service application and Managed Metadata Service application should also be reviewed and tested to see whether and how they will be used in the farm.

• “Optional” service application standards— If SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise is being used, a number of additional Service applications can be rolled out, including Access Service application, Excel Services Service application, PerformancePoint Service application, PowerPoint Service application, Visio Graphics Service application, and the Word Viewing Service application. The organization needs to decide which of these will be deployed, to which users, and at what point in the project. Rolling out “everything” during the initial phases of a project is generally considered ill-advised unless both the user community and IT are fairly advanced in their SharePoint skills and training is provided for resources who will be managing these tools. Figure 1 illustrates the range of service applications available in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint 2010.

  Figure 1. Service applications in Central Administration.

  

• Managing services on servers— For multiserver implementations, decisions should be made concerning which services will run on which server. This can impact performance and the user experience, since overloading servers will impact their responsiveness.

• Monitoring settings— Special attention should be given to the tools in this section of the Central Administration site as they allow the farm administrators to review problems and solutions, review rule definitions, review job definitions and job status, view administrative reports, configure diagnostic logging, review information management policy usage reports, view health reports, configure usage and health data collection, and view web analytics reports.
  

• Backup and Restore— A high-level decision to be made here is whether the native SharePoint backup and restore tools will be used or if third-party backup tools from Symantec, Commvault, AvePoint, or others will be used. If the native SharePoint tools will be used, the farm administrators need to become familiar with the use of these tools and understand their strengths and weaknesses. Although a basic service level agreement (SLA) may be separate from the governance plan, the capabilities of the tools will affect the farm administrators’ ability to meet end-user requests. 

• Security— This page provides access to tools such as the farm administrators group and its members, web application security policies, managed accounts, service accounts, blocked file types, web part security, information rights management, and whether labels, barcodes, auditing, and retention will be available for use. 

• General Application Settings— As shown in Figure 2, these settings include tools such as External Service Connections, InfoPath Forms Services, Site Directory, SharePoint Designer, Search, Reporting Services, and Content Deployment. Each of these tools should be reviewed and decisions made about their configurations.

  Figure 2. General Application Settings page in Central Administration.

  

Having reviewed this list, it may sound like an overwhelming task to define how each and every component will be configured. However, it might be sufficient, based on the organizational needs, to just create a grid of which features and tools will be made available during the initial phase and not delve too deeply into the individual configurations of the tools.

Table 24.1 provides a sample grid that could be used to define the decisions that are made in the area of service applications with a minimal investment of time, and without delving too deeply into the details of the configuration of each service application.

For some organizations, the activity of reviewing the functionality can be done in the scope of a few hours; in others, this process may take months. In either case, the end result is a list of functionality that helps give shape to the governance plan in terms of which tools and features will be supported by IT and therefore need to be governed.

Another key element of the governance plan is defining the scope for which functionality will be governed. Whereas some settings are global to the farm, others are specific to the web application or the service application, and therefore can be made available to limited groups of users. This can, of course, complicate the governance process, but in most organizations, there is a demographic of users who are highly advanced and can be trusted to use more advanced functions, whereas a majority of users would simply get confused or not be interested. Being able to cater to the more advanced group is often where innovation and improvements come from. For additional granularity, features can be activated/deactivated at the site, site collection, web application, or farm level. Depending on how your organization decides to develop its taxonomy or information architecture, activate the features at the appropriate scope to simplify management. The web application and site collection level are typically a better place to manage most functions.