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By: Bryan Lynn
SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest growing server product in company history. One of the primary reasons for this rapid growth is the vast array of features SharePoint provides.
SharePoint isn’t just a document storage repository – it’s a business collaboration platform that brings together content management, search, portal, business process management, and business intelligence capabilities. In addition, SharePoint enables your business units to take advantage of these capabilities with little-to-no involvement from your IT staff.
With all these capabilities at your disposal, it becomes increasingly important for your organization to carefully plan and govern your SharePoint usage. With no planning or governance in place, your organization’s SharePoint environment can quickly become difficult to manage and could ultimately result in an unsuccessful implementation.
In this article, we offer up three tips you can incorporate into your organization’s SharePoint strategy. These tips are simple, practical, and will help ensure you get the most out of your SharePoint implementation.
Tip #1: Use SharePoint Metadata
SharePoint makes it easy to define custom metadata for your document libraries. You have complete control over this metadata – the name of each field, its data type (e.g., free text, numeric, date, drop down list, etc), and any necessary field validations (e.g., is the field required, what is the field’s maximum length, etc).
You should take advantage of library metadata to get the most out of SharePoint. By enforcing a standard set of metadata across all documents in a library, users can quickly and easily find the documents they are looking for. All metadata is searchable and can be used to create SharePoint views, which allow you to customize how your documents are browsed, grouped, sorted, and filtered.
Defining the metadata for a document library is simple. As with most SharePoint features, no involvement from your IT staff is required. With the appropriate permissions, any SharePoint user can manage library metadata using the standard SharePoint web interface.
Tip #2: Use SharePoint Security Wisely
SharePoint provides a very robust and granular security model. It gives you complete control over who can access your SharePoint sites/lists/libraries and what permission each user has. And like SharePoint metadata, all this security can be configured with no involvement from your IT staff.
This granular security model is very powerful, but when used unwisely it can quickly grow out of control and become unmanageable. You may find yourself trying to manage a SharePoint site with hundreds of users, all with varying levels of access to each list and library. A security environment such as this is prone to mistakes and may result in you exposing the wrong content to the wrong users.
Therefore, it’s critical you use SharePoint security wisely. For starters, use SharePoint groups to manage access whenever possible. Instead of granting individual users access to sites/lists/libraries, create SharePoint groups and grant these groups the appropriate SharePoint access. Then, simply add or remove users to these groups to control individual user permissions.
In addition, consider applying SharePoint security at the site level and only grant more granular access if needed. By default, SharePoint lists and libraries inherit security from the SharePoint site they reside in. Therefore, if you can manage all security at the site level, you are assured all of the lists and libraries in the site contain uniform access. Only customize access to individual SharePoint lists or libraries if absolutely needed (e.g., a specific library contains sensitive content and must be restricted to special subset of users).
Tip #3: Understand SharePoint’s Size and Capacity Limitations
For many organizations, SharePoint’s size and capacity limitations won’t be an issue. However, if your requirements call for the storage of extremely large or a high number of documents then it’s important you review and understand these limitations.
Microsoft has published numerous articles on this topic, including this article which provides some capacity guidance and best practice:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx
A couple of interesting recommendations from this article in regards to document libraries are as follows:
• You should not store more than 2000 documents per folder in a SharePoint document library.
• With proper usage of nested folders, a document library can store up to 5 million documents.
• Try to limit the size of a single document to 50 MB or less, with the absolute upper limit being 2 GB.
Most of the numbers presented in the Microsoft article are just guidelines and are not “hard” limitations imposed by SharePoint. Your organization may see slightly better or worse results based on the specifics of your SharePoint implementation.
Summary
Planning and governing your organization’s SharePoint deployment and usage is critical. The tips in this article are just a few of many you should consider as you develop your SharePoint strategy and will help ensure you get the most out of your SharePoint implementation.
Bryan is the co-founder of ThirtySix Software, a content management software solutions provider based in Indianapolis, Indiana. ThirtySix Software’s flagship product, called SmartDocs, enables organizations to reuse their Microsoft Word content by integrating powerful content reuse and conditional text capabilities into their existing MS Word authoring environment. SmartDocs uses Microsoft SharePoint to centralize the storage of an organization’s reusable content, and takes advantage of numerous SharePoint capabilities including custom metadata, versioning, and security.
Bryan Lynn
ThirtySix Software
http://www.thirtysix.net
info@thirtysix.net
(317) 456-2364
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