Introduction

Governance is the process of creating policies and rules and assigning roles and responsibilities to make a system work properly. Even if your attitude is “Good Government is Less Government,” very few of us would want to have no government. In short, governance is the difference between order and chaos.

In this book, we will explore the concept of governance as it applies to a business’s use of the SharePoint family of products. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the concepts of web sites, collaboration, and portals as they are used in SharePoint. SharePoint provides a platform for creating, storing, and retrieving information. This information is generically referred to as content and it can take many forms, such as documents, calendars, lists, and web sites. The features of SharePoint allow users within an organization to collectively or individually create content and publish it for others to use. By making this information quick and easy to find, categorize, and organize, SharePoint can provide a lot of business value. SharePoint is also a very extensive product that contains many features that can cause problems if not used correctly.