As you are recruiting individuals as members of the SharePoint Governance Committee, make certain that they understand and are comfortable with the committee’s charter and mission statement and that they will be willing to share it with individuals throughout the organization.

A high level committee charter includes the purpose of the committee, the time frame that you are asking them to serve and the anticipated amount of time that they should expect the committee to consume during their business week.  The charter will also outline the general focus of the group and the type of decisions that will be made.  If the group will be called upon to make decisions of a technical nature, make certain that the business people on your committee understand that they will be asked to understand the technology and make a determination of it’s validity within their frame of experience.

Your mission statement for the committee should state that the governance committee will be the champions of the use of SharePoint within the organization.  It should also state that the committee will be the highest level of authority regarding SharePoint decisions and that what they decide will inform the policies written around SharePoint and will guide the way that SharePoint is positioned and used within the organization.

The membership of your Governance committee should consist of individuals that are ‘action oriented’ and that are focused on making decisions and then executing against those decisions.  The members chosen to serve on the committee should  have both an appropriate level of business savvy, industry experience and are champions of technology (whether they understand it or not) and be enthusiastic regarding the capabilities that SharePoint will provide to the organization.

Rather than simply discuss SharePoint, the committee will be expected to learn the platform and act as its champion within the organization.  If some on your committee feel as though the governance committee meetings are ‘just another meeting’, then you will need to replace them.  Also, business people who speak entirely about ‘strategy’ and ‘theory’ and don’t bring actionable ideas to the meeting are not doing you any good.

I.S. Departments also usually avoid adding people to the committee that they see as not being ‘technologically aware’.  Why do we avoid adding these people?  Because it takes more time to explain technology and SharePoint to them.  But when you think about it, aren’t those EXACTLY the type of people that you want represented on your committee?  If you are like most companies, you will be spending the majority of your time explaining to the user community exactly what SharePoint does.  So, why not have your ‘technology luddite’ help prep you with content that will explain to the end-user what SharePoint can do for them?

Communication is crucial to keeping the governance committee engaged with their duties.  Most communications should be facilitated via a Governance Committee SharePoint site (duh?!) so that the information is available to the group around the clock.  Communications to the governance committee should include, at a minimum:

• Governance meeting dates and times and the agenda for the next Governance meeting.
• Minutes from each previously held meeting so that those unable to attend will be able to catch up on what decisions were made and what topics were discussed.
• Decisions made in each meeting.
• Any interesting use of SharePoint that’s been encountered within the user community that can be used as a success story.
• Effects of decisions made by the Governance Committee.
• An area for feedback from the SharePoint user community that the Governance committee can interact with directly.
• Upcoming meeting agendas and any work that should be done prior to a meeting.

Your Governance Committee should consist of no more than 12 people and no fewer than 7.  It is often the case that as a committee grows in size it loses the speed with which it can make decisions. A governance committee that’s too small is less representative of the community of users and may make decisions that are not in line with SharePoint’s actual business uses.  A governance committee that’s too large is often subject to political agendas and infighting.  While there is no ‘right’ number of governance members to serve on your governance committee, realize that this committee’s success has more to do with personalities and corporate culture than it does the number of participants.

It is also recommended that you have at least 2 backup members that you can ask to participate in the event that some find involvement in the committee to be too time consuming.

I’m on-site with a client this week and I’m staying in a swanky hotel that I really enjoy.  While I enjoy the accommodations, the fantastic food and the incredible desserts (their chocolate mousse cake will likely be my official cause of death!), I absolutely DO NOT enjoy their horrible wi-fi signal. 

Earlier this evening I received an e-mail from a co-worker with some items that are ready for my review.  Being the good SharePoint Soldier that I am, I connected to our SharePoint environment to check them out of our SharePoint site to work on them locally.  Checking them out of the library proved a little more painful that I anticipated, however.  My system began to download the documents and I waited, and waited and waited some more for the files to process.  After about 45 minutes of waiting around and watching some really bad television program, I went into the document library and looked at the size of these files.  Well, they turned out to be 90 meg in size…each.  On a hotel wi-fi signal that’s lower than Sarah Palin’s approval rating, I don’t anticipate being able to work on these files until sometime tomorrow morning.

So here’s my SharePoint recommendation for you:

A lot of organizations selling the use of SharePoint to their organizations tout the ability for remote workers to be able to more easily access corporate documents, regardless of whether they are working from home or from the road.  It’s true, SharePoint is an excellent, easy-to-use document management system.  However, wouldn’t it be better if we helped out our remote friends by ensuring that we place the the ‘File Size’ column in the document library view so they can anticipate the wait they are in for when they begin to download documents locally?  Something so easy, so simple that makes such a big difference when it comes to user satisfaction.

Include both management personnel as well as individual contributors on your SharePoint governance committee. This will aid in the decision making processes by providing deeper, more relevant context to the discussions.

From the management personnel, a higher level, strategic view of the business will be represented, which will serve to inform where the business is going, some of the elements that it is hoped that SharePoint will address and the path that is planned to move the organization to the next level.

From the individual contributors will come a focus on the practical application of the technology and how the user community will actually integrate SharePoint into their daily work.  When I work with organizations I often try to spend most of my time with the individual contributors, the people that focus on where the rubber meets the road.  These are the people that are planning and executing the vision set forward by management.  SharePoint is very much a ‘hands on’ technology that flourishes when stretched and molded.  It often takes the worker community a little longer to get SharePoint configured exactly the way that they want it, but once it is, beautiful things happen.

The membership of your SharePoint Governance committee should reflect the diversity of business functions within the organization as well as the diversity of opinions users have regarding the use of technology.  The governance committee should contain representatives that are pro-SharePoint as well as those that have some skepticism regarding SharePoint’s usefulness. This will ensure that a healthy debate of opinions occurs which will enhance the robustness of the governance solution outcome. 

Choosing governance committee members that are all PRO SharePoint will feel right for 5 months or so but will hurt you in the long run.  If the committee doesn’t have any members that approach SharePoint, and collaboration’s usefulness within your company, with skepticism, you will miss widespread adoption and will diminish your reputation within the organization.

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for some time to post to various SharePoint blogs I’ve had over the years.  I’ve found it very convenient to be able to write blog posts off-line while I’m traveling and then post them once I gain access to my network.  The functionality of Live Write has been fairly good, but not good enough for it to be great.  Well, I’ve just downloaded the latest version of the Windows Live Suite, Windows Live Essentials 2011, and I have to say that I’m very, very impressed with the enhancements to several of the applications that I use.  Some of these changes will, quite honestly, make me a frequently user of this increasingly powerful Microsoft application suite.

Automatic Linking [Live Writer]

See the word ‘SharePoint’ in the paragraph above, the one with the hyperlink to the Microsoft SharePoint page?  As I was typing the word into Live Writer, Live Write linked it to the Microsoft SharePoint site with a URL I provided in the Automatic Linking configuration area.  Every time, from this point forward, I write the word “SharePoint” in a blog posting, it will be hyperlinked to the URL I setup.  This makes it extremely easy to have a wealth of links stored and available and simply refer my readers to them by typing in the words I’ve associated with the URL.  Now, having the word ‘SharePoint’ linked EVERY time I write it in a blog post would make the post appear a little strange (to me, at least), so I’ve checked the box at the bottom of the Automatic Linking setup screen to “Link to each term only once per post”.  That’s VERY cool!  Now the links won’t be overwhelming within my posts.

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