SharePoint Solutions released an add-on product for SharePoint 2010 last week, to control the site creation process (see the press release at PRWeb). Last January I published a research report on the site creation challenge, and after attending a webinar earlier today on the new product, I’m giving it my “thumbs up.”

In essence, the new tool does two things:

1. Provides a way for an administrator to create a standardized process for creating new sites. Each organization has control over what the site looks like, where it is created, who is joined to the different access groups, and so on. There is a lot of capability built under the hood for administrators to tightly define what should happen, and the tool can link to workflows created in SharePoint Designer too.
2. Provides a way for end users to request a new site, based on one of the standardized designs. If approval is required, the site creation will be held for approval, and once done, the system will work through the list of tasks created by the administrator in creating the new site.

The new product works with SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010.

Learn more at the SharePoint Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant home page.