- Documents are split into too many Teams/SharePoint sites.
- Documents are more difficult to find, as documents are created and stored in different Teams/SharePoint sites, it becomes difficult to find your way back to the right SharePoint site. You also don’t know if the document is correct or if there is a newer version saved on another SharePoint site or file server.
- Since it is easy to create folder structures in SharePoint sites, your users will continue to store documents in folders instead of tagging them with metadata.
- The documents are spread across different SharePoint sites, which leads to poor knowledge sharing and accessibility.
- Metadata tagging is not standard which makes it more difficult to search and find documents, the search engine does not work optimally.
- Users can create teams or SharePoint sites freely. Organisations rarely have a strategy for how to organise their document sets in Teams or SharePoint.
- If you have configured Teams/SharePoint to include mandatory metadata, users can still upload documents without having to tag with these metadata fields.
What are you doing about these problems?
The simple answer is to get MetaShare, but here are some tips on what you should do to start creating order in Microsoft 365.
- Categorize and decide which SharePoint sites and teams you will create, where you will store certain types of documents and which documents you will not manage on these sites. Make a clear description of each team or SharePoint site.
- Use metadata instead of folders on the SharePoint sites that are important to your business.
- Migrate instead of uploading documents to Teams/SharePoint. When migrating, file properties such as created by, modified by, created time and modified time will be kept intact.
- Lock existing file servers and make sure that double storage of documents is not possible.
- Introduce MetaShare in Teams for complete document management functionality. If you use the Teams/SharePoint standard, you need to configure all Teams and SharePoint sites with document management settings and metadata.
- Customize the Microsoft 365 search engine to refine search results based on metadata. It will be much easier to find documents.