SharePoint & OneDrive
Documents people can actually find
Getting files into SharePoint is the easy part. Getting them into a structure that still makes sense in two years, with permissions that hold up, is the work that matters.
Where things live
-
Microsoft 365 tenant
- SharePoint — shared libraries
- OneDrive — personal storage
- Permissions
The problem
Where the documents actually are
Most businesses do not have one document store. They have five, and no agreement on which one is right.
-
Attachments as a filing system
The current version of a document is in an email thread, and finding it means remembering who sent it and roughly when.
-
A shared drive nobody prunes
Folders nested until the path is unusable, several near-identical copies, and no way to tell which one is live.
-
Personal storage holding business files
Work sitting in an individual's OneDrive or on their laptop, which becomes a problem the day they are away — or leave.
-
Permissions granted ad hoc
Access given one link at a time until nobody can say who can see what, including things that should be restricted.
What Forge provides
Structure first, then the migration
Moving a mess into SharePoint produces a SharePoint mess.
So the structure is agreed first — how the business actually thinks about its documents — and the migration is run into that.
-
A structure that matches the business
Sites and document libraries organised around how work is grouped in practice — by client, site, job or department — rather than by who created the folder.
- Document library organisation
- Naming conventions agreed and applied
- Clear split between shared and personal storage
- Searchable rather than dependent on remembering a path
-
Migration off the old locations
Getting documents out of old drives, personal storage and inboxes, and into the new structure without losing anything on the way.
- Data and document migration from existing systems
- OneDrive set up for genuinely personal working files
- Permissions set deliberately at the point of migration
- Properly backed up as part of Microsoft 365
-
Keeping it tidy afterwards
The structure only survives if new documents land in it automatically rather than depending on everyone remembering the rules.
- Documents filed automatically by the systems that generate them
- Consistent reference numbering on generated documents
- Applications reaching your tenant through Microsoft Graph
- Documentation at hand-over so the structure is written down
In practice
SharePoint as the document store behind an application
For GB Solutions UK, SharePoint document libraries were organised as part of the wider Microsoft 365 work, and the three bespoke portals then file their finished PDFs into that structure automatically. Because the portals reach the client's own Microsoft 365 environment through Microsoft Graph, the documents stay in the tenant the business already owns rather than in a third-party system.
Related services
Next step
Where do your documents live at the moment?
If the honest answer is "several places", that is the normal starting point. A free consultation will map what you have and what a sensible structure would look like.