SharePoint Consulting to Improve Portal Usability

Customer

The Customer is an American manufacturer of corrugated boxes.

Challenge

The Customer had a SharePoint Online internal portal. Document management and collaboration were inefficient, as the Customer’s employees couldn’t manage the portal effectively. For example, the portal got overloaded with multiple outdated documents, which had a negative effect on the portal’s search functionality: the search results contained many irrelevant documents.

Solution

The Customer approached ScienceSoft with a request to provide consultancy on how to organize effective management of the SharePoint portal. Our consultants held interviews with the Customer to find out their business needs, analyzed them and worked into business requirements, which the team further used as a basis for creating a guide to SharePoint Online portal management. The guide consisted of three sections, each containing detailed guidelines on:

• Permission management (providing unique permissions for libraries, assigning unique permissions on files and folders, configuring and adding permission levels).
• Document uploading to SharePoint (selecting a SharePoint library, copying files from File Explorer, pasting and validating the copied files).
• Document archiving (activating and setting up the content organizer feature, setting up a source library for archiving, setting up a retention stage and applying a retention policy).

After our team delivered the guide, they arranged remote training for the Customer’s employees to share best practices of configuring the relevant document management features and using them effectively.

Results

Due to the guide and training, the Customer’s staff learned how to make the most of the SharePoint portal’s capabilities. It allowed them to eliminate the document overload by removing outdated and irrelevant content from the portal for archiving. As a result, it became easier for the Customer’s employees to use the portal and find the required documentation.

Methodologies

Business needs analysis