SharePoint
Structure, permissions and metadata that make a tenant searchable, governable and safe to point Copilot at.
Assessment + implementation. An estate assessment, then the remediation, migration and governance it calls for.
IT and information managers who own the tenant, and the business owners who live in it.
Nobody can find anything, permissions have drifted past anyone's understanding, a file share is still the real system of record, or Copilot is coming.
SharePoint estates are rarely designed. They accumulate. Someone creates a Team for a project, which creates a site nobody names properly, which gets a folder structure copied from a file share, which is shared with the whole company because that was faster than working out who needed it. Multiply by four years.
The symptom is search, the cause is structure
“Search does not work” is almost never a search problem. It is a metadata problem wearing a search costume: no content types, no managed metadata, four copies of the same document with different names, and a term store nobody maintained. Search can only rank what it can describe.
Permissions drift is the expensive one
Inheritance gets broken to solve a Tuesday problem and never restored. Sharing links outlive the projects that needed them. People leave and their sites stay. None of this is visible in daily use — until an assistant with a natural-language interface makes every one of those documents reachable in a sentence, or until someone asks for an access review and there is no way to produce one.
Information architecture before migration tooling
We design the structure first: hubs, site patterns, content types, term store, and a small set of metadata that earns its place. Migration then moves content into that design, and the things that should not survive the move — the 2014 tender folder, the eleven copies of the org chart — do not.
Work we have done
SharePoint audit for AI readiness — energy services and construction. The concerns were security and information risk, and there was no information architecture to implement against. We reviewed the estate, found a significant number of high-risk issues, and designed the information architecture along with the other remediation the estate needed. Our recommendation was to clean up and close the high-risk gaps before going near a rollout, and to treat the estate redesign as the step after that rather than something to fix on the way.
SharePoint audit for AI readiness. We reviewed a SharePoint estate against what an assistant would actually need from it — permissions, structure, and whether the content was current enough to answer from — before any rollout was committed to.
Structure first. Tooling second.
- 01Assess
Sites, owners, activity, sharing links, external access, storage. What is dead, duplicated or quietly high risk.
- 02Design
Hubs, site patterns, content types and a term store small enough that people will use it.
- 03Remediate
Broken inheritance, orphaned sites, links that never expired, and everything shared with the whole company.
- 04Migrate
Content moved into the design — not the folder structure copied across with the mess intact.
- 05Govern
Provisioning, ownership, review and archival, so it does not re-accumulate within a year.
A migration is the one moment structure can change without asking people to reorganise their own work. The 2014 tender folder and the eleven copies of the org chart stay behind, and that decision is made deliberately rather than by whoever runs the tool.
The practice
Estate assessment
Sites, ownership, activity, sharing links, external access and storage. Which sites are dead, which are duplicated, which are quietly high risk.
Information architecture
Hub and spoke design, site provisioning patterns, navigation, and where a Team stops and a document library starts. Designed against how the business is organised, not how the tenant grew.
Taxonomy and metadata
A managed metadata term store, content types and columns people will actually fill in. Enough structure to make search work, and not one field more.
Permissions remediation
Broken inheritance, orphaned sites, sharing links that never expired, and everything shared with Everyone except external users. Fixed in an order that does not take the business down with it.
Governance and lifecycle
Who can create what, who owns it, how it gets reviewed, and how it is archived. Without this, an estate re-accumulates within a year.
Migration
File shares, on-premises SharePoint, Google Workspace, Box and Dropbox. Content mapped into the new structure, with what should not come across left behind.
Search and findability
Search schema, managed properties, promoted results and the metadata behind them — the part that decides whether anyone believes the search box.
Records and retention
Retention and records handled in Purview against the structure built here, so policy applies to the estate rather than to a diagram of it.
Adoption
The habits that keep it clean: where things go, what gets tagged, and why the shortcut everyone used before is now the slow route.
What you keep
The code and the data·Your existing relationships·Approval and control·The ability to stop·The off switchWhat that means
Start with a 45-minute briefing.
No pitch. We’ll map your situation against what actually works and tell you honestly where to start.