SharePoint governance

Concept

The policies, roles, responsibilities and processes that control how an organization uses SharePoint: who owns sites, how sites are created and shared, and how content is reviewed.

Description

Microsoft defines governance in general as "the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that control how an organization's business divisions and IT teams work together to achieve its goals." This sentence comes from the page for SharePoint Server, which says it does not cover SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

For SharePoint in Microsoft 365, the Microsoft Learn guide on intranet governance says: start governance planning early and review it regularly. A governance team should include business and IT and stay in place after launch. The business is responsible, not IT alone. Policies are requirements; guidelines are recommendations. Topics named include external sharing, default sharing links and metadata. Ownership of sites should be defined, for example with a primary and a secondary contact per site. Sites can be created by request or by self-service. Policies work best when site owners do not have to think about them, for example through site designs. A review cycle can be automated, for example with Power Automate.

With SharePoint Advanced Management, Microsoft offers tools in three areas: content sprawl, the content lifecycle and oversharing.

Sources (Microsoft Learn, checked in November 2026): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/intranet-governance , https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/governance/what-is-governance-in-sharepoint , https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/advanced-management

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Maintained by Mirko Peters (Microsoft MVP) · Last updated: 2026-11-11