MOSS 2007 Governance

More and more businesses I speak with are  struggling with ways to successfully deploy all of the applications and business requirements that can be delivered in a MOSS platform without some structure and process.

To help you succeed Microsoft has recently published a specific Governance and Information Architecture page on TechNet to help organize these key materials.

• Information architecture in SharePoint Server 2007 – Scott Case of Interknowlogy, in this case study describes the process by which a fictitious company plans, customizes and deploys an Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation in a large organization.
• SharePoint Products and Technologies customization policy – Sean Livingston, then of MS IT, now the PM for upgrade in WSS for the next version (hint, hint).  He explains his thoughts on supportability of customizations in 3 levels of service, a plan that MS IT uses to manage it’s hosted offerings of SharePoint internally.
• Sample governance plan – Mark Wagner, MCS lays out an easy to fill out enterprise governance plan, including defining governance roles and responsibilities, operations policies, training, and resources.
• SharePoint Server 2007 governance checklist guide – this handy reference guide takes information from Robert Bogues article as well as information from Joel Oleson’s TechEd Governance talk and articles being published on this landing page in the coming weeks.  This is exactly the same as the Governance checklist given out at TechEd.
• Logical architecture model: Corporate deployment – Brenda Carter of the Technical Documentation team for TechNet SharePoint IT Pro, lays out an easy to use, fresh take on “logical architectures” which goes into examples of construction of farms, SSPs, Web Applications, and Site Collections. 
• Governance Workspace – This codeplex workspace on governance focuses on free tools and information sharing in the community.  Two tools, both from MS IT currently are available here.  The MS IT Site Delete capture, and the the IT Site Life cycle management.  Both designed to help save the IT Pro time and money.

Beyond these great documents from Microsoft we at Unique World are also putting together a Governance Toolkit that will cover:

• The Managing and traking of business requirements for applications developed in MOSS 2007;
• Development Standards and Code reuse processes in MOSS 2007;
• Deployment and migration advice;
• Operational issues eg. Monitoring, Backup and Restore;
• Change Management; And
• UAT and testing processes.

We would love to hear from you if you think the above list is missing anything or if you’d like to be a beta site for the program just get in contact with me via the links on this page.