Microsoft’s SharePoint product line has become a critical tool for the majority of businesses today. Along with that popularity, however, comes a new set of challenges in information governance. Organizations are finding that, if left unmanaged, a SharePoint document management and collaboration platform can quickly devolve into an unwieldy mess of thousands of sites, rapid database growth, and poor search capabilities. While SharePoint is quite powerful out of the box, it can quickly lend itself to unmanaged growth that, if not properly addressed, can lead to the platform itself becoming more of a liability than a benefit for many organizations.
What is needed is a strategic information governance plan that tackles factors such as explosive content growth, security and Site management, extended records, and archive management. Without a comprehensive strategy, even the best designed SharePoint environments will spiral out of control quickly.
This whitepaper addresses how organizations can enhance their SharePoint environments by implementing sound information governance and by taking advantage of technologies and processes that can help to control the growth. We cover storage management optimization concepts such as externalization of content (RBS/EBS), Rights Management Services, archival and extended records management, and governance of the users and security in SharePoint.