Information management and governance in SharePoint

APPLIES TO: 2013 2016 2019 Subscription Edition SharePoint in Microsoft 365

How will you govern the information in your organization, such as documents, lists, websites, and webpages? How do you maximize the information's usability and manageability? Who has access to what information? How are you making information available internally and externally, and to whom?

Information architecture determines how the information in that site or solution—its webpages, documents, lists, and data—is organized and presented to the site's users. Information architecture is often recorded as a hierarchical list of content, search keywords, data types, and other concepts.

Assess your organization's information architecture to make it as efficient as possible: A comprehensive assessment of your organization's information architecture can help you identify efficiencies, such as the following:

• Use metadata to make it easier to search for and compare related data or content.

• Manage versions and records to ensure that you can tell which is the authoritative version of a document.

• Catalog and store information properly so decision-makers can find and rely on the right data.

• Design navigation and present information so that users can find important sites and information.

• Integrate your information architecture with your environment's search strategy, so your users can find the right information. Information architecture includes the wireframe and site map, search and navigation, managed metadata tags, and content types.

• Define a publishing strategy: distribute authoring tasks and use cross-site publishing to control the design of the site and display of the content.

Good information architecture supports the following goals:

• Manageable Can the IT team effectively implement and manage the information?

• Meets requirements Does the information architecture meet regulatory requirements, privacy needs, and security goals?

• Increases business effectiveness Does the architecture add to your organization's effectiveness?

Questions to ask when you design a site or solution:

Be sure to consider access to content when you design your solution and sites. This overlaps with IT governance as you consider your entire environment. Ask these questions:

Information management: permissions and audiences

IT governance: access

Govern your information by using tools for information management, including:

Determine the rules or policies that you need for the following types of items: pages, lists, documents, records, rich assets, blogs and wikis, feeds, anonymous comments, anonymous access, terms and term sets, and external data (Business Connectivity Services).

As a good information management practice, consider the balance among the following factors:

• Availability Content needs to be available when users need it and where they can get to it.

• Access Consider who has access to the content. If it should be secure, is it?

• Redundancy Shared copies reduce redundancy and provide one version of a document.

Consider your priorities for different content by thinking through questions like these:

• Which of these factors is the highest priority for each type of content?

• Is availability more important than access?

• Is access more important than redundancy?

• What would make it so difficult for users that they would be tempted to use a different solution?

• What trade-offs are possible or desirable?

The following table presents resources that are available to help information architects plan the information architecture of your SharePoint solution.

Information architecture resources