A guide to SharePoint intranet governance

Intranet governance is the allocation of decision rights and accountability. It answers who gets to decide something about the intranet, and who is answerable for the outcome once it has been decided.

This series works through those decisions area by area, and each post takes one part of it: what has to be decided, who holds the decision, where SharePoint helps you hold somebody to it, and where it leaves you to work that out for yourself.

1. 1. What SharePoint intranet governance actually means sets out the definition, the difference between governing an intranet and managing one, and the tooling Microsoft 365 provides.
   2. How intranet governance decisions get made looks at who decides what across IT, internal communications and the business, and how a disagreement between them gets settled.
   3. Ownership and access in SharePoint separates the Site Owners permission group from the person answerable for the site.
   4. Publishing standards for intranet content covers the rules authors work to when they build a page, who writes those rules, and who is answerable when they are not followed.
   5. Governing the content lifecycle asks who is answerable for a page after publication, how often it gets looked at again, and what happens to it at the end.
   6. Governing navigation and findability covers who owns the navigation at each level it exists, and who answers when a page that exists cannot be found.
   7. Oversharing and Copilot in your intranet weighs up whether to work through years of tolerated access before or after a Copilot rollout.
   8. Measuring intranet governance takes on whether your governance is working, which is a different question from whether the intranet is busy.

The common thread

Microsoft 365 gives you a set of governance tools rather than a governance system. The tools take care of the parts that can be automated, and they do it well: a site ownership policy notifies the sites that fall below the minimum number of owners you set, an attestation policy asks owners to confirm on a schedule that a site is still needed, and the data access governance reports show where content has been shared. All three sit in the SharePoint admin center as part of SharePoint Advanced Management. 

However, they do not allocate accountability. Each of them works from the rights people hold rather than from who should answer for a site.

Series links

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