Create a SharePoint Governance Site

When you have SharePoint or any other technology employed as a platform or enabler for your organization, it is important to have governance.  This means having a governance board and a governance document. Having this figured out is great, but much more important is communicating about the information you have agreed on. For this purpose , a governance site or site collection could be a great way to both dogfood your platform and inform your employees: A SharePoint Governance site is a great information place for

–          your users to find information on what to put where or to ask for a new site

–          your site owners for a list of their sites

–          your Governance board for meeting minutes

–          your IT department to know what SLA it has agreed

–          your Support department to use as a knowledge base

It is the ideal place to show off your glory projects, to inform your users.

What is in a SharePoint Governance site template ?

Governance plan

One of the most important pieces on your Governance site is your Governance plan. This could be a document, but a SharePoint wiki is so much more powerful. Break down your information into pages and link them together. Have “mail-to” links to employees and add links to lists.

Knowledge base

A knowledge base is very important to help your users and support department to find answers to questions. You can use a wiki for this, or a list (based on a question-answer principle).  Give your support people write access on the list or wiki to make sure all questions are handled and documented.

Site list

A site list is very useful. It can display the link to the site, the template used, the site owner and other relevant information.

Who-is-who

A list with users that have extensive knowledge about SharePoint is a very handy feature as well. When users have questions or feedback, they will know who to contact. Add the roles and responsabilities as well, together with a handsome picture!

Other Governance documents

Other Governance documents can be put here as well:

–          meeting minutes of your governance board

–          technical SLA from your IT department

–          reports from your environment

These documents don’t have to be accessable for everyone. It could well be that only your board members could see and edit these documents.

Blog with tips & tricks

Another very useful part of your site could be a team blog with tips & tricks to inform site owners or other key users on best practices, changes in your governance plan or SharePoint platform.

Example sites

Another useful feature to get new users up to speed to what SharePoint can mean for them is a collection of example sites. These subsites can act like commercial sites to display diferent templates, jquery techniques,  3d party applications or homemade technical solutions.

Training

Training is perhaps the most important job in having a good and reliable platform. Have your training documents here, link to movies online,  exams,… Add a link for users to request coaching or a training. Don’t reinvent the wheel, use the SharePoint Productivity hub.

Support center

Together with your knowledge base, this is the place to be if your users have questions. A ticketing system or task list can handle user requests and questions.

What is on my Homepage?

Every site needs a homepage. This is the place where navigation is very important: not too many links, nor too few. Add a webpart with some quick action links:

–          how can I request a site ?

–          I have a problem, who do I need to contact ?

–          Link to the governance plan

–          Link to end-user training documents

–          …

Next to these links, add your contacts and the documents that have changed recently.

Top it off with some announcements and a dashing image and you are ready !

How does your SPGovernance site look like ?