Being able to produce communication sites through SharePoint without having to use IT can be a big selling point for many organizations. This is just one of the recent features available thanks to a recent Microsoft update for SharePoint. Organizations are hopeful that this feature will allow them to utilize SharePoint for other uses than just a repository for documents.
However useful SharePoint can be to businesses, users should be cautious when it comes to governance. Governance can become a major problem for businesses after this SharePoint release because there is no control for review or revision built in; therefore, challenges can arise.
Communication Sites Can Come from Anyone
As it stands today, anyone with proper permissions to build team sites can create communications sites. This allows for the possibility of duplication of both kinds of sites.
However, since both sites can also have an air of authority, particularly when put next to a SharePoint team site, there is a danger for them to contain incorrect information that could confuse some users.
SharePoint Communication
In a conventional publishing model, content either moves through a workflow or needs approval. However, in the newer communication model, there’s not a review cycle which can lead to issues at the level of corporate communications.
With the older method, if a user creates a communication site (and everyone has access to these sites) , anyone could accidently (or purposefully) include incorrect information that would then release to the masses.
SharePoint Processes
Followers of communication sites will eventually see news content from every communication site they follow on SharePoint show up on their homepage.
While this could be an ideal situation, there are issues.
If the information only shows up when a user is following communication sites, then there’s no way for businesses to easily subscribe to a set of communication sites.
Additionally, some critics say that SharePoint makes it too easy to unfollow communication sites, which will lead to users missing information.
