SharePoint 2010 Governance Areas

One of the interesting and intriguing aspects in SharePoint is Governance. Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that you establish in an enterprise to guide, direct, and control how the organization uses technologies to accomplish business goals. What to govern, at level of granularity to govern and who should govern such that governance is effective is important. At a minimum - as per my understanding - the following aspects should definitely be looked into at the start of any SharePoint project.

Governance Aspects	Owners of Governance Areas
	IT Team	IT Admin	Business Owners	Content Owners	Site Designers	Legal Team
Overall navigational structure of your solution (Themes, css, tabs, breadcrumbs, links, "back button")	P		P		P
Overall content structure of your solution (Site Hierarchy, Document Libraries, Lists, External Lists)	P		P
Responsibilities for content accuracy				P
Multi Language Support			P	P
Quota templates		P
Reusable Content Types	P
Permission levels and Security Groups			P
Permission Inheritance	P
Security Groups – SharePoint Groups or Active Directory Distribution Groups or Active Directory Security Groups	P
Maximum upload size		P
Custom Site Templates	P		P		P
Content Expiration				P		P
Usage of Remote Blob Storage	P		P
Search Scopes (Site Collection, Web Application or Farm level)	P		P
Search – Basic, Advanced, Fast Search Server	P		P
Metadata	P		P	P
Term Stores		P
Social Features Activated – tags, bookmarks, ratings			P
Resource Throttling		P
Content Organizer	P
Sandbox Solutions	P		P
Backup and Restore (frequency and actual testing)		P
Site Archival (Policies and archival process – in place record management or record management site or 3rd party solution)		P	P			P
Forms Tools to be used – InfoPath Forms, SharePoint Designer, ASP.Net Forms, 3rd Party Forms	P		P
Workflow Tools to be used – Windows WF, SharePoint Designer, 3rd Party Tools	P		P
My Sites – Creation, storage limits, backup policy and archival policy	P		P
Content Storage Limits	P	P
Development Tools – SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, InfoPath, 3rd party tools	P
Client Side Coding – SharePoint Client Object Model, XSLT, JavaScript, 3rd party tools	P
Recovery, load balancing, and failover strategies		P
Web Parts and Features			P
Web Parts and Features allowed to be personalized by users			P
Mobile device support or multiple device support	P		P
KPIs, Dashboards, Reports			P
Integration with other systems – Web services, BCS, external content types	P		P
Excel Services, Performance Point Services for Data Intelligence	P
Authentication – Kerberos, SSO, Windows Authentication – NTLM, Basic, Anonymous	P
User Profile Management – Active Directory or 3rd party
Offline Availability	P		P
E-Mail Message Record Retention (SharePoint Site or Exchange Server)	P		P
Training – very important aspect is SharePoint training so that users can create effective support requests.	P		P
Site Ownership - Site owners may switch teams or leave the enterprise, making it unclear who owns content or causing sites to be locked			P
Regulatory Compliance		P	P	P		P
Server Patches and Upgrades	P	P

Governance is an ongoing activity. Once the initial plan is in place the team needs to see that it is followed. The team must meet periodically for the same and make upgrades to the initial plan based on the new requirements. No matter what is in the document, users may ignore it completely unless they agree with the basic principles. Do not think of it as being - "final" - at any one point in time. The governance plan is a living, breathing document as you learn more about how users are using the solutions and capture feedback from their experiences.