So, you have your templates ready

and you want to allow your colleagues to collaborate finally. With the planned rollout of SharePoint your old DMS should be phased out, and the documents will be migrated from the old DMS to SharePoint. Users should answer just a few simple questions using your existing “Internal Request Management System” and then have their site automatically created.

But wait a minute! How about your company’s information classification? Wasn’t there a process concerning information that is classified as “critical”, like personal information, or strategic plans of HR and such?

That process is intended to help keeping control about the information ownership and respects all the regulatory rules that need to be applied to information that your twelve thousand co-workers could access from all over the globe.

• Part of the process is a recertification of roles, like ownership and access permissions,
• another part is about requesting and granting access for more users, or to revoke access for users that leave the company or that are transferred between units or between countries, which might require complying to different regulatory policies.

So how is this addressed with the automated “scripted site provisioning process” that you had in mind before?

Will all your sites be created equal in terms of security and critical information? Is a small project like setting up trainings concerning “common topics” at the headquarter’s supposed to be “critical” information? Probably not. Is a set of files about the health status of individuals to be classified “critical”? Probably yes.

At the end of the day there needs to be a consulting and design process that is built around the information architecture of your enterprise, the life-cycle of the information you want to manage (with SharePoint), and the regulations as well as policies that are already in place.

Maybe you want your rollout project to be a lighthouse project to finally get those things straight, that were so often ignored or at least circumvented in the past – but this might be yet another project than just a rollout of SharePoint to provide collaboration capabilities…