Jeremy Thake

If you missed any previous part of this series, you can read them here. In the series so far, we've talked about how accountability, quality, appropriateness and restrictions have all been key drivers for why we need to focus on governance for Microsoft SharePoint within our organizations. To continue this series, I want to focus on another key area called Discoverability. What does this term mean? It is the quality of the content being discoverable (able to find information) within SharePoint. Unfortunately, this also happens to be one of the biggest pains within organizations today. Now, you would think with an enterprise search engine, managed metadata service application, content types with site columns, and versioning that this wouldn't be so difficult. In reality, however, it can often make this harder than just searching on a file system because the search cra... (more)

SharePoint Gone Wild: Driving Up Adoption Levels

In this post, I will cover adoption - one of the key things to be aware of when you're aiming for high adoption levels is that without focus on the aforementioned requirements, adoption will be low. I've been writing these in order for a reason - in order to drive high adoption levels, you must be able to address the other seven business drivers first. Adoption is one of the key ways to measure the return on investment, and overall success, for SharePoint as a service within an organization. What do we mean by SharePoint adoption? Different organizations measure adoption in diff... (more)

Are Email and Personal Drives Hurting Collaboration Efforts?

How often has this happened to you: You're working on a project that needs feedback from other members of your organization. You send out an email with your project attached, asking some of your colleagues to respond with any feedback they see fit. Soon after, you get multiple emails from various colleagues offering suggestions and changes. Now you've got to aggregate all of the suggestions back into your original document, hoping that none of them conflict since your colleagues have no idea what they each suggested. Sure, you'll likely get all of the information you need, but is ... (more)

SharePoint Gone Wild: When Governance Lacks Compliance

If you've missed any previous part of this blog series, you can read them here. When people think of "compliance" from a Microsoft SharePoint perspective, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Every organization will have different considerations for compliance: Essentially, which regulations they need to comply with according to their specific industry vertical, including HIPAA/HITECH, DOD 5015, Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 and 2.0. There are two main drivers for compliance I see in organizations for SharePoint, due to the risk of non-compliance and subsequent l... (more)

SharePoint Gone Wild: When Governance Lacks Accountability

In a webinar entitled ‘Business Drivers and Checklists for Successful SharePoint Governance', Randy Williams, SharePoint MVP and AvePoint Enterprise Trainer & Evangelist, and I discussed the business drivers that come from individuals outside the IT department for SharePoint as a service within an organization. These drivers often result in policies being defined to set the expectation with the business and to focus alignment with the IT department. Over a series of posts, I will focus on horror stories, from some of our 8,000+ customers we have here at AvePoint, which provided ... (more)