IT Governance

The following checklist will help define items usually assigned to the Information Technology department when governing a SharePoint environment. The IT department can utilize the resources below to determine what services to monitor and how to monitor services and content within SharePoint. Supporting details around IT governance can be found in Chapters 6, 7, and 8.

• Define Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Plan for managing content
  • Plan site maintenance and management
    • Identify types of sites to deploy (intranet, extranet, Internet)
    • Plan for creating site collections
    • Plan for creating subsites
    • Define process for removing unused sites
    • Plan for site access request processing
    • Plan for site ownership roles and responsibilities
    • Create content crawling schedules for search
  • Plan content controls
    • Create quota templates for each type of site
    • Define usage reporting and analysis needs
    • Determine use of My Sites and User Profiles
    • Create site templates
    • Enable publishing in portal sites
    • Monitor content database size
    • Block unwanted file types
    • Plan content auditing requirements
    • Create workflow policies and template workflows
    • Determine SharePoint Designer usage policies
    • Create Information Management policy templates
• Plan for managing the SharePoint farm
  • Design the server topology
    • Establish the server roles to be deployed
    • Determine the number of servers to deploy in each role
    • Establish guidelines for deploying additional servers in a role
  • Plan for backup and recovery
    • Define item level recovery plan
    • Define site level recovery plan
    • Define web level recovery plan
    • Define farm level recovery plan
    • Define server level recovery plan
    • Define process for restoring service applications
  • Establish security policies
    • Define managed service accounts
    • Implement user profiles
    • Define permission policies
    • Define permission levels
    • Define process for creating SharePoint groups
    • Define process for requesting membership in a group
    • Plan authentication providers
    • Plan for anonymous access
    • Plan application pools
  • Plan for server upgrades and maintenance
    • Create server and software patching plan
    • Define downtime schedule
    • Define response procedures to unplanned outages
    • Perform disaster recovery test at each level of the farm
  • Create monitoring plan
    • Configure resource throttling
    • Configure the Sandbox Service
    • Create performance monitoring profile
    • Create baseline for capacity planning
    • Establish automated alerts for performance issues
  • Plan for collecting log and trace data
    • Deploy ULS logs to a non-system drive
    • Set trace levels and file schedules
    • Enable event log flood protection
    • Deploy the SharePoint logging database
    • Configure usage data collection and processing
    • Configure customized health analyzer rules
    • Assign responsibilities for health analyzer alerts
    • Set automated health alerts