SharePoint Document Management:
How to manage corporate’s documents
If your archives are not cooperative and still rely on folders and directories, you have a problem.
Because without the support of an intelligent platform, you are fighting against your documents instead of governing them. And you are losing.
With SharePoint, you can turn that around.
Why should you use SharePoint to manage your business documents?
This is a good question, and also one we are frequently asked.
That's why we decided to give a conclusive answer in this article, exploring the peculiarities of a document management system, along with the aspects to consider to create a truly effective one.
Effective, to keep under control the number of documents, files and content that any business has to produce to survive in the market and secure its growth there.
Because bureaucracy is a necessary evil; it's only an evil when you don't have the right tool to govern it.
For us, SharePoint from Microsoft 365 is that tool.
What is intranet.ai?
intranet.ai is the ready-to-use corporate intranet, designed to reduce costs and implementation times, thus creating a collaborative and modern digital work environment:
- Initial price of 3,650 €/year for a complete intranet
- 50+ applications, including advanced search, document management system, push notifications via Teams, personal profile, and FAQ pages
- 100% integrated with SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365
SharePoint and the lifecycle of a digital document
To substantiate our answer to the initial question, we must first clarify the purpose of a company's document management system.
Far from being a mere archive, a document management system serves to control the entire life cycle of each document it contains.
Specifically, we could say that the life of a document consists of 4 main phases:
- Creation.
- Collaboration.
- Cataloging.
- Conservation VS Elimination.
Creation seems like a clear concept; however, it is a step that hides some complexity, as it is not enough to simply open a file and fill it with content and information to obtain a useful digital document.
On the contrary, one of the advantages in digitizing one's archives is precisely the possibility of adding contextual information to simplify their management.
To this end, SharePoint allows you to use particular content information (Content Type) to define in each document:
- the owner;
- the creation and last edit date;
- the target user group;
- the permission level required to access the file;
- the version;
- the current status, such as "draft," "published," or "approved."
and the list continues, branching out into various and possible custom labels.
The function of this information is to give a logical and consistent structure to the documents, so that they are organized by categories from the moment they are created.
Translated: no more folders divided by theme.
In addition, this information also makes it possible to index the contents of a file, thus helping users find the documents they need without wasting time browsing through the local folders on their PCs or the pages that make up the company website.
There would be more details to add, but we will talk more about that later, when we address the third phase.
So let's move on to the second: collaboration.
Collaboration represents a more structured step in the life of a document.
Indeed, it includes several sub-steps, such as co-writing, revision and approval, which intersect with each other and may depend on the actions of a conspicuous as well as varied audience of users.
A good document management system must therefore make communication and file exchange fluid, both between the people involved and between the platforms on which documents must move to be compiled.
Just imagine having to collaborate with colleagues in your company. Until recently, the process was more or less as follows:
- The file was created.
- One would duplicate it, often to a personal USB stick.
- The flash drive was given to the recipient person, who would download the contents to his or her pc.
- The file was edited locally.
- One would have to return to step 2 and continue like this until the end.
This is all very unhandy, especially if we think about data security issues, but the arrival of cloud platforms has turned the paradigm on its head and allowed effective communication between people and applications to be built into this scenario. And not only that.
The cloud revolution has boosted remote working, paving the way for real-time collaboration on files from any device and location.
At this point, you might be wondering what the difference is between a cloud platform like SharePoint Online and a competing product like Google Drive or Dropbox.
Both free people from the shackles of a desk and a single device on which to save and edit work content; however, Microsoft's tool has better cards to show.
Suffice it to say that SharePoint has 2 advantages that differentiate it from other products:
- Deep integration with the Microsoft 365 suite, making it possible to co-create and save an Excel, Word and PPT files directly from SharePoint. Ergo, users communicate and work on documents in sync and without ever leaving their digital workspace.
- Microsoft security protocols extend throughout the entire work environment, down to individual documents stored in SharePoint. In particular, data are protected by encryption and multi-level permissions systems, which control their sharing and access by users at any time.
In addition to these features, there are numerous other capabilities that your company could leverage to improve its relationship with its documents.
Again through integration with Microsoft's technologies, you can tie Power Automate workflows to SharePoint collections. For example, you could automate repetitive tasks such as archiving attachments to your e-mails or requesting approval for new files placed in a shared library.
If you are interested in the topic, we recommend reading our article on
the most widely used workflows for SharePoint Online.
One last interesting feature worth mentioning is that related to "versioning" and change history.
With SharePoint, you can in fact access all versions of your current documents to compare the results of changes made by users with access to the file and see if the work is progressing in the right direction. If it isn't, you could always decide to restore an earlier version so you don't have to waste time editing the file or, even worse, start from scratch.
Useful, isn't it?
Now that we have delved into the second phase in the life cycle of a document (which we might call the most important one), let's see how SharePoint relates to the third and fourth.
We have already seen how the contextual information offered by SharePoint plays a crucial role in cataloging documents in a digital repository.
Let us briefly review the key concepts:
- Users can specify context data (metadata), which will be used to catalog files without using folders.
- Metadata is indexed so that users can find the documents they need using SharePoint's search bar directly.
In addition to this, contextual information is used to customize workflows related to document collections and control access to their content.
Based on the metadata entered to define the document type, the authoring user, and its expiration date, Power Automate will perform different tasks. For example, if the document falls into the "HR" category, the approval request will be directed to the HR manager(s) rather than to his or her counterpart in Administration.
The same logic applies to a myriad of situations, such as sending a custom notification to a particular group of Teams or storing a file in a particular site library.
On the security side, metadata can be used to give users permission to edit, review, or simply view the contents of a file or an entire library.
In this way, permissions granted at the tenant or site level are tailored to the needs of departments and individual teams, which may need to control access to their documents in a more granular way.
We thus close the third phase to move on to the fourth and final phase, which is the permanent archiving of a document versus its total deletion.
Let's see what features SharePoint offers to manage both.
Unfortunately, there is not much to say about how to store permanently your documents in SharePoint, other than to add the small note of creating a library to house files that have outlived their usefulness.
Particular attention should then be paid to the division into categories and the space occupied in storage.
The former fulfills a mere tidiness requirement; the latter, on the other hand, must be carefully evaluated, since SharePoint, while a tool famous for its scalability, has its limitations.
Specifically, it has a total space of about 25TB, while storage for individual items corresponds to 250GB.
Once these limits are exceeded, either the system blocks the loading of new content or it starts to give performance problems.
For this reason, the advice is to plan a lifecycle that includes the deletion of that data that, perhaps due to old age, will no longer come in handy.
Since the deletion of a SharePoint site, as well as its archives, needs a rather detailed explanation, we won't go into it here.
But don't worry we already have the guide that completes the picture.
If you want to learn more, we recommend our article on
how to delete a SharePoint site in 5 moves.
Now, if the reasons we have presented have persuaded, or at least intrigued you to use SharePoint as a platform to manage your business documents, it will be useful to see together how to configure it for that goal.