… in a company of just over 2000 people. So howz your SharePoint Online governance plan coming along….?

Office 365 groups has been punted as the next best thing to sliced bread. Everyone seems to think it’s such a great idea to link 6 different products together with one account. And yes yes, in some cases it is working, but you know, it is also creating endless site sprawl. Endless new silos of information being spat out daily because a new SharePoint site collection is created with every single O365 group created from either Outlook, Teams, Planner or Yammer. And most of the time, people are just wanting to have a conversation without realising all these other toys are being provisioned. The site collections are lying around empty by the thousand at this point, and you can’t delete them, because you’ll delete the conversations too.

You have to look at your intranet from the perspective of the company owners, not the individuals. You are employed by that company, they pay you a salary to do a job – not hoard information because you think it belongs to you. Any content you generate whilst employed by a company, belongs to that company.

You as the company owner / intranet management, need to ensure that governance is in place to guide people on what they can put where, otherwise silos will continue unabated. You need to put the right placeholders in that specify where final, strategic, company electronic assets must be stored – and people must sign that they will adhere to that. Otherwise they simply won’t, and you as a business owner will never get a complete picture of what your company is up to. That’s when fraud starts to take place; because there are no checks and balances in place.

Office 365 groups are also being punted as the “answer to shadow IT”. Except why should one company have a total mandate on all the tech we use in life? Are the tech giants trying to kill every other smaller tech platform so they can just dominate all of us at will? Do you know a single company anywhere that just use one or two platforms? I don’t. Most use dozens, if not over a hundred. It’s just the way it is. We will never get everything into one platform, nor should we.

Be kind to your IT guys right now, they have their hands full more than you can possibly imagine.