Information architecture
A site and library structure built around how your business actually works, not a mirror of an old drive letter.
Microsoft 365
SharePoint Setup & Design
The cost of a badly built SharePoint is paid every day: staff hunting for the current version, and nobody able to say who can see the finance folder. We design the structure, the permissions and the migration around how your business works, so people spend their time on the work rather than on finding the file. Done properly, it also gives you the access records a compliance review will ask for.
What this protects
Findable files, and access you can prove
SharePoint holds the knowledge the business runs on. Whether staff can find it, and whether you can show who has seen it, decides what it is worth.
Time spent hunting for files
Staff looking for the current version are not doing billable work. A structure built around how you actually work gives those hours back every week.
Access you can account for
Knowing who can reach your finance and HR files is a question a compliance review will ask. Role-based permissions make it one you can answer.
Knowledge that outlives its authors
When someone leaves, what they knew should stay. A library people understand keeps the business running on something more reliable than memory.
Lift and shift is how SharePoint projects fail
The usual approach is to copy every file server folder into SharePoint, preserving the structure exactly. That structure was already hard to find your way around, and it now arrives with permission inheritance nobody understands and a search that returns eleven near-identical copies of the same policy.
SharePoint rewards a bit of design. Where should information live, who should see it, how long should it be kept, and what should have been deleted years ago. Answer those first and the technical work follows naturally.
What we design
Permissions
Access granted by role or group rather than per-person and per-file, so the picture stays manageable.
External sharing
Governed guest access and link rules, so sharing with a client is deliberate rather than accidental.
Metadata over folders
Tags and views that make documents findable regardless of where they happen to be filed.
Migration and tidy-up
Moving the data across, and taking the chance to remove the duplicates and dead files nobody owns.
Retention and governance
Labels for what must be kept and for how long, applied automatically rather than remembered.
Where SharePoint projects go wrong
- Every department is made a separate site and nobody can see across them
- Permissions inheritance broken site by site, so no one can say who has access to what
- The old file server is copied wholesale, duplicates and all, into a single library
- External sharing is left on the default, which is more permissive than most businesses assume
- No retention rules, so nothing is ever properly disposed of
- New starters are added to groups at random because the groups mean nothing
What a permissions review finds
Permissions sprawl is normal, and it is rarely anyone's fault. A site is created for a project, individuals are granted access directly, the project ends, and the permissions stay. Repeat that for five years and you have a system nobody can audit.
We move access back to role-based groups, document who can see what, and put a simple process in place so the next project does not restart the sprawl.
Signs it is time to fix your SharePoint
- You cannot answer confidently who has access to your finance or HR files
- The same document exists in several places, and nobody knows which is current
- Search returns everything except what you were looking for
- A leaver's access was never properly removed
Questions we get asked about SharePoint Setup & Design
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