SharePoint governance gets a boost from Axceler's latest release of ControlPoint today. The company's SharePoint management product adds an industry first--a governance policy wizard for setting global policies. Other SharePoint products might have governance modules, but "As far as being able to create policies and enforce policies, I'm not aware of anyone else doing this," Axceler CEO Michael Alden said.
With this latest release, ControlPoint also adds Apple iPad-friendly mobile access enhancements. The product supports both on-premises SharePoint and SharePoint in the cloud, covering SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2007, and SharePoint Online in Office 365.
"People feel they don't have a good handle on governance," Alden said, even though it's crucial to SharePoint success. "The adoption of SharePoint will never take off if you don't have governance."
"I think it's an overwhelming task for IT," said Gail Shlansky, senior director of product management. At a recent SharePoint user group meeting, "One guy said they've been trying to get sign-off on governance components for two years."
The Governance Policy Manager within ControlPoint employs a wizard that lets you create global policies, and instances of those policies, to roll out and manage in a structured manner. You point and click to create a new one, select its settings, review the policy, and then create an instance of it to specify what part of the farm it will apply to. After you create instances, you schedule them to be applied. You can see what sites and scope they apply to, as well as see other policies already created. And you can enforce policies as well.
Shlansky demoed the wizard, creating a versions policy governing how many versions of a document are kept. Then she created a policy, commonly seen in governance plans, regarding SharePoint Designer--setting it so that all the site collections within a web application had SharePoint Designer turned off.
ControlPoint also offers permissions management, in-depth activity and storage analysis, content management, and alerting functions. The architecture integrates seamlessly with SharePoint and supports a distributed environment, with various dashboards for IT, CIOs, and business managers. To learn more, see the Axceler website.