Most organizations lack a formal SharePoint life cycle management process. What frequently happens is a company finds itself facing uncontrolled SharePoint growth. SharePoint quickly becomes a disheveled mass of new sites, old sites, stale sites, and even duplicate sites. Left to their own devices, users begin creating business-critical applications in obscure SharePoint sites that IT doesn’t even know about. Without proper guidance and controls for style, navigation or branding, every team, department and business unit has a site that looks and feels different from everybody else’s. Further complicating the matter, SharePoint users (you know, those folks who have to do their jobs in order to keep the doors open and the paychecks flowing) become disillusioned because the uncontrolled SharePoint growth negatively impacts the relevance of search results, making it more difficult for them to find the content they are looking for. Decision-makers come to realize that without the proper tools, it is costly to manage SharePoint.
Pressure then builds-up on the SharePoint team to manage growth before it gets further out of control. As a result of this problematic situation, many companies proceed to take away user self-service site creation. This knee-jerk reaction is really no better than plugging a hole in the levee with your thumb. Because now that business users don’t have the ability to create sites on demand, every project manager, team leader and administrative assistant in the company starts calling or emailing to request a new SharePoint site. And, the overworked SharePoint Team Leader starts getting calls from the beleaguered IT Infrastructure Manager who’s getting calls from the demanding CIO because the frustrated business leaders are complaining that they can’t get SharePoint sites out the door fast enough to run the business. The SharePoint team has a limited number of thumbs, and those holes in the levee are popping-up everywhere.
Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 solves the SharePoint lifecycle management problem. SPGA lets you create SharePoint governance templates in which you decide beforehand where different types of sites are created in your taxonomy. And with SPGA's lifecycle management features, you'll be able to set your own SharePoint Governance policy to decide when a site should be expired. SPGA enforces the site creation and maintenance section of your SharePoint governance plan while still allowing the free flow of user self-service site requests. With SPGA in-place, the cost to manage SharePoint growth is brought under control, but without those bottlenecks to slow down business. SPGA achieves this through a centralized site request management hub which leverages workflow, policy and auditing to allow you to tame the monster of uncontrolled growth.
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