SharePoint Sprawl: When Growth Becomes a Governance Nightmare

One of the most common headaches in SharePoint administration is sprawl. What starts as a well-structured environment—clean site collections, clear hierarchy, sensible permissions—often devolves into a tangle of abandoned sites, redundant libraries, and confusing permissions structures.

I’ve seen this play out in many environments. A new project team spins up a site. A department head requests their own collection. Someone discovers “Create Site” and before long, the environment looks like an uncharted wilderness.

The real problem isn’t just the number of sites—it’s that no one can easily tell:

• Which sites are still in use

• Who owns them

• Whether the content is relevant or outdated

• What permissions have drifted away from policy

  
  

Both SharePoint Online and on-premises environments suffer here. Online tenants often balloon because self-service site creation is so easy. On-prem farms accumulate sites across years of upgrades and reorganizations. In both cases, sprawl erodes productivity, creates risk, and makes governance feel impossible.

Traditional Attempts at Controlling Sprawl

• Manual Inventory Audits: IT teams often attempt to document sites manually or keep spreadsheets. This is immediately outdated the moment someone creates a new site or abandons an old one.

• Restricting Site Creation: While locking down who can create sites sounds good, it often slows down business and leads to shadow IT as employees go outside SharePoint for collaboration.

• Periodic Clean-ups: Administrators try to run usage reports or PowerShell scripts. In Online, this might mean exporting activity logs. In on-prem, it might mean querying the content databases or running health/usage collection. Both are brittle and resource-intensive.

  
  

How the Commander Tool Cuts Through Sprawl

This is where the Commander Tool makes a difference. Instead of relying on piecemeal scripts or guesswork, Commander provides a real-time map of your entire SharePoint environment—whether cloud, on-premises, or hybrid.

With Commander, you can:

• Instantly discover every site, subsite, and collection—including long-abandoned ones.

• See usage patterns at a glance: Commander highlights which sites are active and which are dormant.

• Identify site owners so you know who to contact about cleanup or lifecycle decisions.

• Enforce best practices: Quickly surface sites that are missing metadata, following broken naming conventions, or diverging from governance rules.

  
  

Instead of spending hours (or days) crawling through logs or begging users to tell you which URLs they care about, Commander lets you take control in minutes.

Final Thought

SharePoint sprawl will always be a natural byproduct of collaboration—it’s proof that people are using the platform. The challenge is channeling that growth into something manageable and sustainable. With the Commander Tool, sprawl stops being a nightmare and becomes just another part of a healthy governance routine.