Safari Books Online - 9780735625389 - Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Best Practices

Information technology provides the knowledge worker with the tools necessary to independently create, share, and manage information without the intervention of a system administrator or a software developer. Good governance balances this freedom with just enough organization to guide individual decisions toward the organization's goals. The balance point between structure and chaos is unique to each organization and often changes over time. Obviously, then, good governance is difficult to achieve, but it is critical to a successful deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The creation of governance and high-level taxonomies for your Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment is, in and of itself, a best practice. So if after reading this chapter you think that you've not found many references to SharePoint Server 2007 or its deployment best practices, it is because the entire chapter represents an overall best practice that requires significant explanation.

Many organizations don't even try to find the right governance balance because the task seems quite intimidating. Those organizations usually move to one extreme or the other in the governance continuum; either they "lock down" everything and remove freedom from the knowledge workers, or they move toward chaos by removing all restraints. Either extreme is damaging. A locked-down computing environment becomes a constraint that knowledge workers must avoid entirely or surrender their minds. At the other extreme, organizations often choose to unleash a tool on the organization and wait to see what happens, hoping that intelligence and understanding will arise from a chaotic mass of undifferentiated information and random activity. In the end, neither approach will deliver a desirable outcome

Safari Books Online - 9780735625389 - Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Best Practices