SharePoint Document Management System Based on 12,000+ Workflow Rules

Customer

The Customer is a European chemical manufacturing company with 4,000 employees.

Challenge

Due to the company’s business specifics, the Customer had a lot of unconventional data like drawings and images that were kept unorganized on-premises. Therefore, the Customer needed a document storage solution that would ensure their structuring and secure storing together with conventional documents like contract documentation and reports.

Solution

After analyzing the Customer’s requirements, ScienceSoft’s team decided to implement a SharePoint Online document management system for secure storing of the Customer’s data in the cloud. First of all, our SharePoint team uploaded the Customer’s documents from a hard drive to OneDrive for Business and then to our server. The Customer provided our team with 12,000+ rules that defined the way of structuring and searching the documents across the storage. Our team needed to apply these rules in organizing the documents into libraries and folders and searching them by metadata, so they developed a specific tool for the task.

The Customer’s documents had a complex system of versions identified by figures, letters, and their combinations. Since SharePoint supports versions identified only by figures. So, the Customer and our team agreed to refrain from using the platform’s versioning functionality. To enable tracking document versions, our team decided to create 5 libraries for the Customer’s documents:

• Engineering documents.
• FBD (functional block diagram) documents.
• Issued documents and reports.
• Models and drawings.
• Vendor documents.

Within each library, ScienceSoft’s team created two folders: Current Revisions (the latest versions) and Other (all the other versions). Each library had a certain number of tags (usually, 6 or 7) to enable search. After creating the storage, our team uploaded it to SharePoint Online.

Results

The implemented document management system based on SharePoint Online helped the Customer to streamline document storage and processing. The document storage enabled the Customer to have all the company’s documents well-structured and easily searchable across the five libraries, which facilitated their document-related business processes and increased productivity.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, Visual Studio Code, C#, CSOM, PowerShell.