SharePoint Online Governance Areas

 

One of the interesting and intriguing aspects in SharePoint is Governance. Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities and processes that you establish in an enterprise to guide, direct and control how the organization uses technologies to accomplish business goals. What to govern, what level of granularity to govern and who should govern such that the governance is effective is important. In the article written on SharePoint 2010 Governance, I had laid down the following aspects that should definitely be looked into at the start of any SharePoint project.  

Now how are these aspects affected in SharePoint online vs SharePoint On Premise. Some areas are not affected at all. Whereas some are affected drastically, like for example, since SharePoint Online is a multi-tenant environment,  to maintain optimal security, privacy and system performance customers do not have access to the timer jobs.  Whatever Governance is required on the premise is also required in SharePoint Online. Some of my observations for SharePoint online are noted below.

GovernanceAspects

Owners ofGovernance Areas

 

SP ITTeam

SP Admin

BusinessOwners

ContentOwners

SiteDesigners

LegalTeam

Overall navigational structure of your solution (Themes, CSS, tabs, breadcrumbs, links, “back button”)

PCare needs to be taken from a Governance perspective that customizations that could break on any update from Microsoft should be avoided.

 

 

P

 

P

 

Overall content structure of your solution (Site Hierarchy, Document Libraries, Lists, External Lists)

P An InternetPublishing Site is not currently available in SharePoint Online. You need to build this type of site in SharePoint Server 2013 in an on-premises deployment.  There are certain List and Library limits. For example, you can have up to 276 columns in a list for columns that contain a single line of text.

There are also certain Page limits. You can add up to 25 Web Parts to a single wiki or web page.

 

 

 

 

Responsibilities for content accuracy

 

 

 

P

 

 

Multi Language Support

 

 

P SharePointOnline triggers the timer jobs to create the hierarchy for your source and variation labels. This takes some time to complete, it is not instantaneous.

 

 

 

Quota templates

 

PIn SharePoint Online the server resource quota specifies how many resources should be allocated to each site collection within a tenant.

 

 

 

 

 

Reusable Content Types

P

 

 

 

 

 

Permission levels and Security Groups

 

 

P

 

 

 

Permission Inheritance

P

 

 

 

 

 

Security Groups: SharePoint Groups or Active Directory Distribution Groups or Active Directory Security Groups

P Various security features have different limits. For example, a single user can belong to no more than 5,000 security groups.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maximum upload size

 

P

 

 

 

 

Custom Site Templates

P

 

P Problems can occur when moving site templates from a SharePoint Server on premise to SharePoint online. Certain features and content types may not even be available depending on the SKU and configuration.

 

 

P

 

Content Expiration

 

The Expiration Policy timer job is set to run daily, so there could be a delay in the processing of the retention policy.

 

 

P

 

P

Usage of Remote Blob Storage

Not available to SharePoint Online customers.

Search Scopes (Site Collection, WebApplication or Farm level)

 

In SharePoint Online, when you create a new managed property it can only be of type Text or Yes/No and it can't be refinable or sortable.

 

 

P

 

 

 

Search: Basic, Advanced, Fast SearchServer

P There arelimits to the number of entries you can have in a custom search dictionary orthe number of rows that are returned as part of a search.

 

 

P SharePointOnline lacks a search connector framework, custom entity extraction, Query rules, advanced actions and extensible content processing.

 

 

 

 

Metadata 

PSharePointOnline does not support hybrid synchronization with on-premises definitions.

 

 

P

P

 

 

Term Stores

 

PTo support a strong enterprise content management strategy, SharePoint Online taxonomies and content types might need extra care to keep term and content type IDs identical to on-premises equivalents.

 

 

 

 

 

Social Features Activated: tags, bookmarks, ratings

 

 

P

 

 

 

Resource Throttling

 

P The threshold limit of 5000 cannot be increased in Online as opposed to on premise.

 

 

 

 

Backup and Restore (frequency and actualtesting)

 

P

 

 

 

 

Site Archival (Policies and archivalprocess: instead of record management or record management site or a third-party solution)

 

P

P

 

 

P

Forms Tools to be used: InfoPath Forms, SharePoint Designer, ASP.Net forms, third-party forms

PWhen users view a form in a mobile device browser, some controls appear differently than they do in a desktop browser and some controls are ignored completely.

 

P

 

 

 

Workflow Tools to be used: Windows WF, SharePoint Designer, third-party tools

PMost all of the third-party programs may not work due to the restrictions by Microsoft.

 

 

P

 

 

 

My Sites: Creation, storage limits, backuppolicy and archival policy

P Capacity planning for My Site Personal Site Quota. For example If you are rolling out MySites to 50000 users and each has 1 GB My Site, you would need a 50 TB database space.

 

 

P

 

 

 

Content Storage Limits

P

P

 

 

 

 

Development Tools: SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, InfoPath, third-party tools

P Most all of the third-party programs may not work due to the restrictions by Microsoft.

 

 

 

 

 

Client-side Coding: SharePoint ClientObject Model, XSLT, JavaScript, third-party tools

P Most all of the third-party programs may not work due to the restrictions by Microsoft.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recovery, load balancing and failover strategies

 

P

 

 

 

 

KPIs, Dashboards, Reports

 

 

P

 

 

 

Integration with other systems: Webservices, BCS, external content types

P SharePointOnline does not have the full customization or API set of the on-premises or dedicated instances of SharePoint.

 

 

P

 

 

 

Excel Services, Performance Point Servicesfor Data Intelligence

P Limited support.

 

 

 

 

 

Training: very important aspect isSharePoint training so that users can create effective support requests.

P

 

P

 

 

 

Site Ownership: Site owners may switchteams or leave the enterprise, making it unclear who owns content or causing sites to be locked

 

 

P

 

 

 

Regulatory Compliance

 

P

P

P

 

P

Server Patches and Upgrades

Not required, as done by Microsoft.