Today, organizations can store and share information easily within the SharePoint application. It is however important that you take time to implement best practices in order to realize the full potential of the platform as a whole.

I wanted to share some of the common best practices that I have seen when implementing SharePoint so in this article we will cover best practices for the following topics:

• Site Design
• User Administration
• Content Management
• Search and Navigation
• Performance
• and lastly Monitoring

Why Focus on Best Practices?

The SharePoint platform can be complex and there are multiple facets involved and considered as well as implementation details, planning and long term management and support of the solution.

Implementing best practices will help in avoiding costly errors, assist with performance and also can help to achieving the goals and objectives for the implementation.

This leads us to our first best practice item.

1. Defining goals and objectives

Like any project in order to measure success you will need some goals and objectives prior to implementation. What are the requirements? What are you hoping to obtain from the solution? as well as what departments will need to be involved?

There are a couple best practices that can help with weeding through all these details.

First…

What is the defined scope of the implementation?

Some common details:

• How many users will be using the application?
• What type of content and processes are you planning to manage within the platform?
• What platform features are you the most interested in deploying for your use cases?
• What is the current environment like? Are your users used to concepts such as electronic forms, automated workflows, and approvals? Or are these new concepts.

What are the guardrails for the implementation?

Each organization is different and will have rules and guidelines that define what their desired policies are for content management, how users get access, what security needs to be in place or evaluated, and what compliance needs have to be considered before beginning an implementation of SharePoint.

2. SharePoint Site Design

Envision how sites, sub-sites and content will be structured in SharePoint.

This is an important aspect of planning the overall site design. One common approach is to build and draw out your site hierarchy using tools like lucidchart or any visual tool that allows you to define relationships visually.

This will be helpful to users in navigation later on so that they can understand how to get to what they need more intuitively. This is an iterative process with your team and every organization will define this just a little bit differently.

The primary goal should be to make sure that the layout is consistent as possible across all sites in SharePoint.

Why, you ask? can we not be more creative? The answer is yes, absolutely be more creative, but remember that the further you stray from a standard layout the more this invites frustration to users who cannot locate what they are looking for down the line. Simplicity is usually the best approach especially for those who are working cross teams or departments.

Choosing appropriate templates

SharePoint provides a range of templates that can be used to create different types of sites, such as team sites, project sites, and document libraries.

Each template provides a little different capabilities out of the box the way they are. You can always add in parts and content to the site afterwards, but picking the right template you need for the job does matter and can make a difference.

Branding and Customization

Most of the time the branding and customization aspect will be driven by the organizations marketing guidelines. Essentially, in SharePoint it is easy to theme the deployment to match the identity or existing style that the organization wants to present.

If the organization is smaller and doesn’t already have established guidelines you should determine what logos, colors, and style are acceptable. You can always to this process over time with a proof of concept and mockup and build from there.

You should plan on passing these over to your marketing team to make sure that they are ok with the final design and that it is approved before deploying, especially if external customers will be seeing the final product and it isn’t used for just company internal staff members.

3. User Management

There are a host of activities for user management that should be considered.

Out of the box SharePoint comes with some pre-baked roles to use, and quite frankly some organizations may be fine with those and not need anything else defined.

However, you may find that you will need more specific and tailored roles and permissions for different content and site areas. This isn’t an issue as SharePoint is very flexible in this regard.

You can use the outputs from previous activities to determine which roles and permissions involve what specific level of access in order to ensure that the users of the platform only have access to the information that they need.

User Profile Management

It is important to ensure that each user profile within the SharePoint application has the most accurate and up to date information available. This information example is the contact info, job title, department, and their manager as well in the system.

This is important because many types of workflows (such as approval workflows) within the platform will need to send information to a manager for approval, so a lot can potentially go wrong there if not updated correctly.

The good news is that if you are using SharePoint as well as Azure AD, or an on premise hosted hybrid version of Exchange and Active Directory most of this will be handled automatically as users are onboarded, offboarded and changes happen.

If not, then you will need to make sure that there is a process for keeping this information in SharePoint up to date on a regular basis.

Groups and Distribution List planning

Although not technically SharePoint this concept does go hand in hand especially when you start pondering who should be notified when “x” happens. Or what users should be able to access site “x”.

A common approach is to match your custom roles and permissions with a notification group or distribution group so those users will be notified.

This will help when you want to give access to SharePoint sites and subsites automatically down the line as users are created in AD. So instead of having to ask or request permission for each site so users can contribute to the site much of this can be prevented with planned groups in Active Directory that are linked to sites and subsites in SharePoint.

This doesn’t have to get crazy either, keep it simple where possible. Remember, the main goal here is to ensure that users will receive important notifications from any scheduled or manually ran workflows, and to make the onboarding/offboarding process as streamlined as possible.

4. Content Management

Versioning and Approvals

Does your content need to be reviewed and approved before it can be published to the site? Is so then you will need to discuss and think through what that workflow looks like, who should approve and what process should be put in place to make sure that happens every time.

What about tracking the content to make sure all revisions are tracked? Should that be enabled as well?

These versioning and approval workflow decisions should be thought through in order to ensure that they apply correctly to your organizations needs and that changes are being tracked as desired over time.

Creating content types and metadata

Creating content types and metadata involves defining the types of content that will be managed in SharePoint, For example:

• Will you allow the ability to add in web links, or certain file types in document libraries?
• Do you want to restrict other types of files from being added?
• What metadata would be the most helpful to ensure that users can find, locate, and organize information in SharePoint?
• What tags / keys / identification should you have on your content to make it easier to locate?
• Should you additionally classify what content is for internal purpose only, confidential, etc?

By taking time to discover what types of metadata you want to store will help you decide how to organize your content within SharePoint.

Content and Publishing Guidelines

You should work to develop content authoring and publishing guidelines. This process involves defining who can create and publish content within a SharePoint site, as well as ensuring that content is created in a consistent and high-quality manner.

5. Search and Navigation

Configuring search settings

Within SharePoint you can customize the search experience for users. You can also take include search scopes, keywords and metadata that you created in earlier steps to assist with properly configuring the criteria for SharePoint Search.

Optimizing search results

Once you have configured SharePoint search there is a process and period to tune and adjust your results to make them more relevant for what is being asked. This includes optimizing the search algorithm, and providing tools for users to refine their search queries as needed to make the most out of search.

Creating navigation structures

Navigation structures are important and used in the case of search doesn’t exactly solve the searching problem or when and organization has very similar content spread across multiple subsites.

This is when navigation structures can assist as it involves organizing content into logical groups and subgroups. This allows us to build proper navigation menus and links to help users find the information they need.

6. Performance and Monitoring

Optimizing SharePoint performance

Optimizing SharePoint performance involves monitoring and managing the performance of the platform, including the server hardware and software, the network infrastructure, and the overall user experience as users perform work within the platform.

It is also important to notice this section focuses primarily to on-premise deployments of SharePoint since most of the performance and monitoring is performed automatically in the cloud when you are using SharePoint Online.

Monitoring server health and usage

Monitoring server health and usage involves tracking the usage of the platform, including user activity, content usage, and server performance metrics and is an important part of insuring that everything is kosher and highlights what features are used the most within the platform.

Managing logs and analytics

Managing logs and analytics involves collecting and analyzing data about the performance and usage of the platform, and using this data to optimize and improve its performance. So what information do you need to capture, and where will it be placed short and long term?

Lastly

To ensure you are making the most of SharePoint you should take time to think through these best practices in order to plan, design, and discuss how to implement SharePoint in your organization and the departments and teams involved.

Discussions around SharePoint are essential to ensure continued effectiveness of the SharePoint Platform. By doing this you will be able to achieve the business goals as well as maximize your capital investment of the application.