Did you know that using SharePoint without governance can cost you millions in terms of compliance risks, security, storage, and scalability? While SharePoint remains a highly in-demand document management platform, without the right SharePoint governance, it is like an open library with no rules- Everybody has access to every information, finding the right piece of data is time-consuming, and data management is performed in a vulnerable and risky environment.

In this guide, we will explore everything about SharePoint governance, from understanding why it is essential to roles, responsibilities, policies, and strategies. At the end, we will also discuss how you can set up an effective SharePoint Governance using Congruent software. With our SharePoint consulting services, we help you set the right governance policies for your organization.

1. What is SharePoint Governance?

According to Microsoft, “Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and procedures that regulate how a company's business divisions and IT departments work together to achieve its goals.”

In simple words, SharePoint Governance establishes the set of rules and policies for managing data, workflow, processes, and responsibilities, while ensuring that the platform eliminates any chances of disorganization, chaos, and non-compliance. Thus, it is an ongoing effort because these elements are constantly developing.

Effective SharePoint governance plans can:

Streamline the implementation of products and technologies.
Assist you in making the most of your IT investment.
Help keep your organization's system secure and compliant.

2. Why SharePoint Governance is Essential

SharePoint has a significant impact on the entire business. Integrations are available across all Microsoft 365 services. It includes Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups, Planner, Outlook, and Stream.

According to a SharePoint Advisor report, every day, more than two billion files are added to SharePoint Online. In fact, it is used by more than 250,000 businesses and about 190 million people worldwide. If you look at the country-wise usage of Microsoft SharePoint, it’s 50% customers are from the United States.

Image showing the distribution on companies using Microsoft SharePoint by country

So, how do you ensure so much data on SharePoint remains secured, productive, and free from any compliance risks & penalties? Through SharePoint Governance. The SharePoint governance means setting up rules and guidelines for how people use SharePoint while ensuring the platform runs smoothly, securely, and in an organized and manageable way.

3. Benefits of SharePoint Governance

Builds Better Collaboration

Creating a SharePoint site is a collaborative process, not a one-time event. Create a new team in Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint will automatically construct a site. This increases productivity by providing teams with an instant repository and collaborative environment. However, it involves the existence of extra resources such as lists, libraries, and pages that must be monitored and managed.

Applying SharePoint governance guarantees that users can find what they need even as your organisation grows. It also ensures that you maintain the necessary levels of consistency and quality throughout your websites and pages. This creates a virtuous circle for users, since positive experiences encourage them to return for more.
Reduces Data Sprawl & Costs

As data volumes grow (376.4 billion emails per day by 2025), control is essential for limiting sprawl in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. With governance, collaboration, and information sharing may remain linked effectively. It allows users to identify and access the information they need at the right time, rather than wasting time due to sprawl.

There is also an economic benefit to effective SharePoint governance. Organisations get 1TB of storage and 10GB per user license. Although more storage can be purchased, proactively managing constraints can help reduce the need for future investment.
Keeps You Compliant

Data privacy regulations are rising fast; 42% of the US states have already passed data privacy laws as of the beginning of 2025. But different regulations may apply to different firms depending on the location and type of business.

SharePoint Governance automatically updates processes on a regular basis and helps organisations stay compliant when changes occur, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS.
Improves Security

With 22% of the US workforce (or around 32.6 million Americans) working remotely, they need a platform with strong security features. By implementing SharePoint governance, you can:
- Add data protection for sensitive and personalized data.
- Define clear access controls.
- Monitor and keep track of external data sharing.
- Establish data retention policies to minimize risks.
- Adhere to regulatory laws and regulations
- Add features such as multi-factor authentication to mitigate threats to data in transit and at rest.

4. Roles and Responsibilities for the SharePoint Governance Team

When forming an effective governance team, it is critical to ensure that team members and stakeholders work together seamlessly. Additionally, the roles and responsibilities for managing governance should be strictly distributed across teams and individual contributors.

Senior Executive Leaders: These include senior leaders, who provide strong governance in framing policies, strategies, and directives that align with the company’s goals.
IT Executives and Administrators: Their responsibilities include enforcing and managing governance policies regarding cloud infrastructure, permissions, access controls, and authentication.
Department Leaders: They identify the needs for their specific department’s such as sales, HR, Marketing, etc, and ensure that SharePoint meets the functional departmental requirements and policies.
Security and Compliance Managers: They specifically work closely with the IT department to ensure the organization implements data privacy and security measures while maintaining compliance with the industry standards (such as GDPR and HIPAA).
Content Managers: From creating metadata to tagging the data files, archiving, and deletion, they maintain the entire content lifecycle management. They ensure every document is accurate, easy to find, and approved using the defined workflow.

5. Creating Your Governance Plan: Key Policies & Strategies

SharePoint is utilized by approximately 80% of the Fortune 500 firms in order to collaborate and exchange documents. So, what policies and strategies do these top organizations use to create an effective SharePoint Governance plan? Let’s explore:

Governance Goals

Clearly define your goals for SharePoint governance, i.e., data protection, collaboration, and adherence to organizational laws and regulations. Ensure to keep governance aligned with organisational business goals and focus organisational priorities.
Roles and Responsibilities

Define the roles governed, i.e., administrators, site owners, and content managers. Next, elaborate on the responsibilities of each role regarding permission management, content life cycle, and governance rule compliance.
Permission Management

Enforce a hierarchical model or permission system. It must operate on the least privilege principle for the SharePoint site, library, and content. Also, perform regular reviews. Periodically, audit permissions to ensure they remain valid for current business requirements and scaling organizational needs.
Content Management

Implement policies and strategies for content longevity. The policies will manage all: content creation, storage, sharing, and archiving. Establish a content governance framework to determine how long the content is valuable to keep and when it should be destroyed or retained. Add metadata and tagging strategies to make the content easy to search and categorize at will. Use version control to manage changes to documents and prevent users from editing outdated versions.
Security & Compliance

Enforce data integrity, confidentiality, and regulatory compliance policies (i.e., GDPR, HIPAA). Put in place security controls like encryption, access controls, and multi-factor authentication to block unauthorized access and cyber-attacks on the data.
Monitoring & Auditing

Keep track of usage trends, web activity, and storage utilization to be able to chart issues and identify room for enhancements. Establish regular audits to enforce governance policy compliance, validate security threats, and adhere to documented procedures.
Awareness and Training

Provide training and facilities to educate the user regarding content management features, governance policy, and best practices. Regularly remind users of SharePoint governance programs, policy changes, best practices on the site, and safety routines for use.
Continuous Improvement

Install a feedback mechanism to gather user and stakeholders' comments on the efficacy of the governance and how it should be improved. Periodically examine the governance policies and strategies to see if they still meet the company’s requirements, technology changes, and evolving regulations.

6. SharePoint Governance for Microsoft Copilot

The Microsoft Copilot works as a smart AI-assistant in SharePoint. It helps in creating content, generating new drafts, and rewriting texts using a text editor. Here’s a representation of Microsoft 365 Copilot architecture:

Image representation of Microsoft 365 Copilot Architecture

According to Gartner's 2024 research, only 6% of organisations have moved their copilots from pilot to deployment, with the remaining 60% still in the piloting phase. Reason? Copilot has transformative potential, yet many organisations have serious doubts regarding its governance. Here are the top four ways to establish effective SharePoint Governance for Microsoft Pilot:

Enable Data Security and Access

Since the Copilot gathers all the information from the data it has access to. It is important to ensure that it only accesses the data as per the permissions granted by the user. Implement governance policies to limit access to sensitive or private information for Copilot. It will eliminate the chances of any undesired exposure to AI responses.
Data Labeling

If proper governance controls are not in place, Copilot may share responses to teams or individuals with whom the information must not be shared. This is because the SharePoint access controls are limited to user roles and locations rather than data substance and context. Thus, implement data labelling to avoid such risks and limit Copilot adoption. Microsoft uses the following container labelling and file classification:
- Highly Confidential
- Confidential
- Confidential
- Public
ROT Data Minimisation

Even before Copilots, organisations were concerned with ROT data. ROT stands for Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial data. ROT data raises security and compliance concerns, and when used by Copilots, it can have a negative influence on response quality and accuracy. The key to enhancing Copilot answers is establishing SharePoint governance policies to reduce redundancy, quarantine suspicious data, and delete inconsequential information.
Establishing AI Transparency

What if the AI-assisted content surpasses the actual document lifecycle? In such cases, clear governance guidelines should help in differentiating the AI-content stored, used, and reviewed from the human-generated content. Adding tags such as AI-assisted to the content generated by Copilot brings clarity.

Also Read: Guide to use Microsoft's Copilot in SharePoint

7. Tools & Technologies for SharePoint Governance

Several tools can help with SharePoint governance implementation and upkeep.

Tool / Feature	Description
Sensitivity Labels	Use sensitivity labels to safeguard data and limit access. This guarantees that critical information is only available to those who need it.
Microsoft Information Protection	This tool uses labels and policies to classify and safeguard sensitive information within SharePoint.
SharePoint Administration Centre	This resource offers a centralized location for controlling settings, defining policies, and tracking activities throughout your SharePoint system.
Audit Logs	Enable and analyse audit logs to monitor user activity and detect any suspicious behaviour or policy violations.
Third-Party Tools	Consider employing governance tools like Orchestry, which include advanced capabilities such as automatic policy enforcement, extensive reporting, and compliance management.

Also Read: Comprehensive Guide to SharePoint Admin Center

8. How Congruent Software can Help you Set Up SharePoint Governance

Setting up SharePoint governance can be complex. That’s why organizations benefit from expert guidance. Congruent Software provides practical consulting and outsourcing services to help you get it right.

We focus on solutions you actually need and avoid unnecessary customizations or add-ons. With over 18 years of experience in SharePoint consulting, our goal is to maximize SharePoint’s built-in features. Our team includes certified project managers, scrum masters, and skilled SharePoint developers who have experience in supporting businesses of all sizes, from small companies to large enterprises.

We help organizations get the most out of SharePoint. Whether it’s planning governance, customizing features, or integrating new tools, our approach is practical and results-driven.

The following are the benefits of partnering with Congruent:

End-to-end SharePoint consulting and support.
Expertise across SharePoint functional and technical areas.
Workflow, integration, and automation services.
Branding, portal development, and user adoption support.
BI, reporting, and content migration solutions.
Governance planning and implementation.

9. FAQs

What do you mean by SharePoint Governance?

SharePoint Governance defines a framework for policies, guidelines, security measures, rules, roles, and responsibilities to ensure a secure, collaborative, and efficient SharePoint usage across the organization.

Who is responsible for managing SharePoint Governance?

Senior Executive leaders, IT executives and administrators, Department Leaders, Security and Compliance managers, and Content managers are responsible for managing SharePoint Governance.

What are the different tools that can be implemented for SharePoint Governance?

Sensitivity Labels, Microsoft Information Protection, SharePoint Administration Centre, Audit Logs, and other Third-Party Tools can be implemented.

The Comprehensive guide to SharePoint governance