Microsoft promises improved governance in SharePoint 2010

A couple of weeks ago when I announced on Twitter that I would be interviewing a SharePoint representative, I invited my followers to send me concerns I should ask about. One big concern that came back was about site governance across multiple SharePoint sites. This isn't surprising given the ease in which users can create SharePoint sites. The result is that governance often gets overlooked, but should an eDiscovery order come in, having so many sites (many of which probably aren't even active) makes it very difficult to find and isolate data you may need.

Last week, I had the opportunity to interview Ryan Duguid, senior product manager ECM at Microsoft, and I asked him how Microsoft planned to improve governance in SharePoint 2010 without sacrificing ease of use, no easy tightrope for Redmond to walk.

A look back at SharePoint 2007

Duguid says that governance is sometimes a casualty of ease of use. "One of the realities behind it is that, because of the ease of use of setting up SharePoint sites, there are a lot of people who have not appraoched SharePoint deployment with the same rigor they would with an enterprise content management system like Documentum." He adds, you wouldn't see someone hand end users the disks and say, go set up most any ECM system. SharePoint gives end users the power to set up sites with relative ease and IT departments sometimes relinquish their normal controls because they can pass it over to end users and step away.

But Duguid says that although Microsoft has made every attempt to educate companies about the "right" way to set up sites, a lot of companies have ignored their advice. "Not everyone follows our guidance," he says. "We have done a lot of education. We have an entire set of SharePoint deployment services that we helped fund." Duguid says that in SharePoint 2007, companies should have been turning on version control and retention schedules (among other things), but it's clear that many companies weren't doing this.

Looking forward to 2010

Microsoft couldn't help but hear the complaints because even with its attempts at education, I'm constantly hearing about problems with SharePoint and governance. In some ways it's a bit ironic because when Microsoft attempted to control and restrict as it did with Vista, the results weren't very good. Yet when it errs on the side of ease of use as with SharePoint, it hears complaints from IT and governance/security pros. It's hard to win.

Duguid says in 2007, there were basic eDiscovery controls in place, but they have expanded these dramatically for 2010, making it possible to declare any piece of content as a record with all of the record keeping control that goes with that. "We have expanded the scope of holds in 2010, to include any piece of content in the SharePoint environment," he says. This could be traditional content like a document or social content such as a blog, wiki, discussion or announcements list. Duguid says this gives enterprise administrators more control.

He says that for 2010, Microsoft was trying to provide more comprehensive records management capabilities to give record keepers a more traditional set of functionality. "Our goal for 2010 is to bring all the constructs to bear, to declare anything as a record in place, send it to archive, apply in-place holds or extract information from a secure archive [along with] workflow to manage information."

It's clear that Microsoft has heard the concerns of administrators, but until we see 2010 in action and see how well it lets administrators find information across multiple sites, it's hard to know just how rigorous these tools really are. For now, you can download the SharePoint 2010 Beta and try it for yourself. If you do, leave a comment and let us know your experiences. - Ron