Making SharePoint part of governance strategy

The popularity of Microsoft SharePoint across organisations in every industry has grown at a furious rate. Business users love the simplicity of it. IT enjoys the hands-off, self-service approach it enables for staff. Moreover, CIOs and CTOs like the fact that Microsoft SharePoint fits with the organisation's overall infrastructure. But the widespread attractiveness and adoption of SharePoint for collaboration comes with some challenges.

Organisations are beginning to realise that the very same reasons they like SharePoint - easy and self-serve site creation, straightforward content creation, improved collaborative work processes, productivity gains, etc - can also contribute to the challenge of sound information governance, storage growth, management and cost, and encumbered site deployment and provisioning.

Information governance, the unification of multiple disciplines such as records management, archiving, and eDiscovery, as well as the policies, procedures, processes and controls for managing the life cycle of business information, is a growing challenge for organisations, and a consideration for many when deploying Microsoft SharePoint. The ability to ensure that Microsoft SharePoint falls within the organisation's information governance strategy is rapidly becoming a key driver of successful deployments.

Many organisations have already invested heavily in enterprise content management (ECM) infrastructure, and are actively seeking ways to include Microsoft SharePoint within a holistic ECM strategy. Additionally, they are exploring solutions to execute a comprehensive information governance strategy for Microsoft SharePoint that enables them to balance the familiarity, intuitiveness, and 'speed-to-collaboration' aspects of SharePoint with those of ensuring consistent corporate policies are observed.

In this way, they can capitalise on the advantages and breadth of capabilities presented by SharePoint, while ensuring sound site deployment and management, that information governance policies are applied across all business content, and that existing investments in infrastructure are fully integrated and leveraged.

As Microsoft SharePoint environments continue to expand, and the amount of business content the sites contain rapidly grows, the need to bring it under the umbrella of the organisation's information infrastructure (which includes SharePoint, ECM technology and other information systems in the enterprise) becomes a priority. But making it possible for knowledge workers to access and leverage relevant content housed in other repositories, e-mail inboxes, physical record stores, and even enterprise systems, such as SAP, without leaving the Microsoft SharePoint interface, is an escalating priority.

Not only does SharePoint content need to be brought under or within the management of various disciplines, including records management, archiving and eDiscovery, but the need to take a holistic view of business content is also critical for quicker decision-making, improving efficiency and driving productivity.

Organisations are seeking out ways to enhance the value and usage of Microsoft SharePoint by providing access to all enterprise content from within the interface. Moreover, being able to access content in the context of business processes is a driver for business today. Provisioning business applications that draw on existing ECM systems, enterprise applications, including SAP, e-mail, file shares, physical records, and more, is seen as a competitive advantage. With it, organisations look to capitalise on the popularity of SharePoint, while driving maximum value to the business by delivering on the promise of a truly holistic content strategy.

Microsoft SharePoint is used by departments throughout organisations to streamline collaborative processes and document-driven projects. This can generate enormous volumes of content that must be managed in accordance with corporate policies and industry regulations.

Operational costs, database growth and storage matters aside, the unfettered propagation of SharePoint sites and content presents significant challenges for legal departments, CIOs, and IT professionals charged with delivering on sound information governance strategies and organisational compliance programmes.

With mounting litigation across virtually every industry, an ever-changing regulatory landscape, and increased demands on IT resources and budgets, allowing SharePoint site growth to go unchecked is no longer a sustainable strategy.

Enterprises are investigating complementary solutions to Microsoft SharePoint that enable them to control storage and operational costs, while ensuring that sound records management, archiving, eDiscovery and other aspects of sound information governance are enforced. The ability to ensure that industry regulations and internal policies are complied with in full is also a key aspect of information governance, and organisations are looking to avoid 'standalone' solutions for compliance reporting to avoid increased cost and additional disconnected third-party solutions.

The reputation of Microsoft SharePoint sites being ultra-easy to set up and simple to use by teams for collaborative document management is well earned. The issue that many organisations are dealing with, however, is that this has led to the creation of thousands and even tens of thousands of sites that are often outside of IT control and left 'abandoned' once they have run their course. The ensuing database growth, additional server costs to keep up with the pace of site expansion, and overall impact of IT operations is of mounting concern to CIOs and IT administrators alike.

The potential proliferation of SharePoint sites that are not connected to the data centre not only represents hidden business and legal risk and costs from an information governance standpoint, but also compounds the issues of SharePoint archiving, storage costs, and infrastructure control.

To address the challenges, organisations are seeking out solutions that achieve the goal of maximising their investments in Microsoft by taking full advantage of the popularity among knowledge workers and value delivered by SharePoint with that of satisfying the business requirement of lowering IT operational and infrastructure costs. Additionally, archiving capabilities that stem beyond simply 'time context' - with full auditability, 'chain of custody', and a metadata-driven approach - is ideal for organisations looking to avoid challenges during eDiscovery or for regulatory compliance.

For further information, please contact Rob Shaw: tel: +27 83 626-3811, fax: +27 86 646-4178, e-mail: rshaw@opentext.com.