At the SharePoint Conference earlier this month in New Zealand, one speaker reported on the use of SharePoint at his organization. The organization was using SharePoint for a variety of purposes — the Intranet, collaboration sites, and more — but one thing in particular stood out to me: they had never closed a site! The net result was that the organization had 7 TB of disk space for sites, no one knew what all the sites were for, no one had a sense of the information currency of the sites … talk about a governance nightmare!

My next book, SharePoint Roadmap Governance Themes, greatly expands on the governance chapter in SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration. Two themes have been explored to date — Site Creation Rights, and User Adoption Strategies — and there are reports available on both of those. The third theme for investigation is Site Closure Policy. In other words, what do you do with SharePoint sites when their useful life is at an end, however you define that?

As with the previous two reports, there’s a survey. If you have involvement in setting governance decisions for SharePoint at your organization, please take the survey now.

Respondents who complete the survey will receive a free copy of the research report, due for publication in July 2010.