SharePoint Best Practice in a Post-COVID World

The date is 23rd March 2020.?Citizens of the UK are told to stay at home.

The next day, working practices are forced to change across the country.?Organisations race to ensure business as usual can continue without access to offices and paper copies of data.?Enter Microsoft Teams, the Seattle-based company’s new baby, already being rolled out by those ahead of the game to replace Skype for Business, which is seeing performance issues after a 220% increase in video conference calls.?IT bosses hastily hit the install button on this flashy new software.?Staff members haven’t been trained how to use the software, but now they are expected to attend their morning scrum meetings virtually.?Anyone can create a Team.?The boss creates Teams for his staff.?The boss’ staff members realise they can make Teams with funny names too.?Each Team created also generates a SharePoint site (that’s where the files tab in Teams points, if you hadn’t made the connection) with a matching funny name.?The corporate director asks the IT Manager why there are now SharePoint sites called ‘The Super Best Friends’ and ‘Euromillions’ (I kid you not, these are genuinely SharePoint sites hosted on a Local Government tenant).?The IT Manager realises this whole cloud thing has become a mess and needs it fixed, before the Information Commissioner comes knocking.

So, where did it all go wrong?

1.?????No planning

2.?????No training

3.?????No governance

We can’t blame organisations entirely.?The need to expedite the roll out of cloud based document management and video conferencing was obvious as soon as restrictions were in place.?However, in spite of many businesses already using SharePoint as a document management system prior to the pandemic, the scramble to mobilise data and employees has meant that file structures and the correct organisation of documents has become less of a priority.?

Unfortunately, this has led to SharePoint and Teams sites being used as ‘dumping grounds’, wherein intelligent document management systems have been reduced to nothing more than the ancient company shared drive, but now in the cloud.?Furthermore, the ease of creating a SharePoint site by proxy, via the establishment of a team, has led to an increased number of ‘silos’ full of company data on organisations’ tenants, but with very little global governance for IT Managers and Data Protection Officers.

How do businesses and public sector bodies fix these problems?

1.?????Set working practice policies

Employees need to know exactly which products they should be using for specific business scenarios.?For example, all documents relating to accounts must be stored on SharePoint; Teams is used for project discussions etc.

2.?????Dedicate super users and administrators

IT Departments are too busy to make small changes to SharePoint sites.?Ensure all departments have a handful of super users with the correct permissions who are able to make changes to library structures and control permissions for subsites and libraries.

3.?????Organise files in libraries that align to GDPR retention periods

SharePoint is designed to ensure organisations have governance over their documents, and are fully compliant in respect of data protection.?Retention and sensitivity labels are included out-of-the-box, and simply need to be applied to sites, libraries or individual documents.?We recommend planning a library structure, whereby all documents within that library conform to a single statutory retention period.

?4.?????Train staff – don’t alienate them

There seems to be a stigma around using SharePoint.?Maybe it’s the way in which it’s been implemented within business, or perhaps it’s because nobody can see its full potential.?Ensure your training is focused on the audience’s job role.?Demonstrate how the data they work with each day can be transformed and organised in simple yet intuitive ways.

?5.?????Explore

As your data is secure within the Microsoft 365 cloud, you have the power to introduce other intelligent 365 services to interact with your data.?Power Automate lets you complete otherwise tedious business processes with one click; Power BI generates intelligent and sleek reporting with the ability to drill-down to data points; Power Apps allows you to design a custom user interface to interact with your data.?The possibilities are endless, and you keep control over what data is shared.

As experts in the Microsoft 365 domain with years of experience designing custom solutions based around SharePoint and the Microsoft Power Platform, 101 Data Solutions offers personalised consultancy on cloud document management best practice for organisations.?We are also able to advise on, and deliver, data migration and cleansing to ensure your document management protocols are GDPR compliant.To find out how 101 Data Solutions can help your organisation, email: [email protected], or call: 0117 435 0485.