SharePoint Done Right: Governance Best Practices for Mid-Enterprise Teams

Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most powerful collaboration platforms enterprises use—but without clear governance, it can quickly turn into a sprawling, hard-to-manage mess. Strong governance ensures that SharePoint remains secure, scalable, and user-friendly. For mid-enterprise teams, getting governance right means striking a balance between flexibility for users and structure for IT.

Why governance matters in SharePoint

• Rapid growth creates chaos. Gartner estimates that 80% of organizational data is unstructured, much of it living in platforms like SharePoint and OneDrive. Without governance, duplication and mismanagement run rampant. (Gartner, 2024)
  
• Compliance risk is real. Forrester notes that unmanaged collaboration content is a leading driver of compliance failures, especially with stricter privacy regulations. (Forrester, 2023)
  
• User adoption suffers. When navigation is confusing or search is ineffective, employees fall back on shadow IT tools—reducing ROI on the enterprise’s Microsoft investment.

Signs You Could Be Getting More Out of Your SharePoint Investment

• Content is hard to manage. Duplicate, outdated, or abandoned sites are piling up—making it difficult to know where the “single source of truth” lives.
  
• Compliance keeps you up at night. Regulatory or industry requirements are becoming stricter, but your current SharePoint setup doesn’t give you confidence in classification, retention, or access controls.
  
• Employees are frustrated. Users struggle to find documents or navigate sites, which leads to wasted time and even the use of unapproved tools outside of SharePoint.
  
• You’re planning for more. SharePoint is being integrated with other Microsoft applications like Teams, Power Platform, or third-party applications, but your governance model isn’t keeping up with the added complexity.
  
• Search isn’t working. Employees complain that SharePoint’s search results are cluttered, incomplete, or irrelevant—slowing down productivity and undermining adoption.
  
• Growth is creating complexity. As your organization adds departments, projects, or locations, SharePoint hasn’t scaled smoothly, and IT is struggling to keep up with new site requests or provisioning.

SharePoint Governance Best Practices

1. Define ownership and roles
Every site and library should have clear owners, content managers, and governance champions to maintain accountability.

2. Standardize information architecture
Consistent templates, naming conventions, and metadata make it easier to find and manage content.

3. Balance flexibility with guardrails
Empower teams to collaborate, but use approval workflows, retention policies, and sharing rules to minimize risk.

4. Automate governance where possible
Leverage Microsoft Purview for compliance and Power Automate for site provisioning, approvals, and lifecycle management.

These best practices ensure governance supports users instead of restricting them, making SharePoint more valuable across the organization.

Where to Start: A High-Level Framework for Making SharePoint Work for Your Organization and Team

If you see the signs that your SharePoint environment isn’t delivering its full value, the next step is to approach improvement in a structured way. A simple framework looks like this:

1. Discover & Assess
   
   • Audit existing sites, permissions, and content.
     
   • Identify pain points such as sprawl, security gaps, or user adoption issues.
     
   • Engage with end users to understand how SharePoint supports—or hinders—their daily work.
     
2. Design & Align
   
   • Define governance policies, roles, and responsibilities.
     
   • Create an information architecture that reflects your organization’s structure and goals.
     
   • Align SharePoint with compliance, security, and collaboration needs.
     
3. Implement & Reconfigure
   
   • Apply updated governance and architecture.
     
   • Reconfigure existing sites to reduce clutter and improve usability.
     
   • Leverage Microsoft 365 integrations to streamline workflows.
     
4. Manage & Evolve
   
   • Provide ongoing monitoring and lifecycle management.
     
   • Schedule regular governance reviews to adapt to business changes.
     
   • Continuously train users and champions so SharePoint adoption grows alongside your organization.

With this framework, SharePoint stops being “just a file repository” and becomes a strategic business tool that supports productivity, compliance, and growth.

AIS’s Approach: More Than Governance

AIS helps mid-enterprise and enterprise organizations not just define governance, but implement, reconfigure, and manage SharePoint so it delivers long-term business value.

• Assess: We evaluate your current SharePoint landscape, policies, and adoption challenges.
  
• Align: We design governance frameworks mapped to your business goals, compliance needs, and Microsoft 365 roadmap.
  
• Implement & Reconfigure: We deploy governance controls, optimize site architecture, and reconfigure existing environments to reduce sprawl, improve search, and boost adoption.
  
• Manage: We provide ongoing management to keep SharePoint scalable, compliant, and effective as your organization evolves.

With AIS, you get more than governance—you gain a trusted partner who ensures your SharePoint environment grows with you, remains user-friendly, and continues to support enterprise collaboration.

Ready to Get SharePoint Working for Your Business?

AIS delivers governance strategies that keep your Microsoft investments secure, compliant, and user-friendly—while also helping you reconfigure and manage SharePoint to get the most from your environment.

Learn more about how we support SharePoint and Microsoft 365. Schedule a complimentary consultation with AIS experts