Forum Discussion
Identifying files associated with a contract
You can use a central document library repository for your documents with metadata for a column with the contractID would work too but having people put everything there is the hurdle. You can link to that library from all your teams by using The website tab on each channel until the native file tab in teams supports SharePoint and metadata.
Thanks Chris and Adam
Doc sets woudl work fine if I had some kind of control but the data could be stored in any one of a hundred+ sites/OD4B folders.
is there no way for O365 to tag a file with metadata no matter where it may be based, maybe, on a users group membership?
Hello Graham Rollerson,
To address your direct question about meta-data, O365 labels could accomplish this.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycompliance/labels
In Ignite this year you could really see the development, and key role Microsoft see labels playing for security and compliance cases like this.
With that said, labels is typically an e5 feature. If my company already had e5, or they were willing to cover the expense for them, 100% I would use them. This would work to solve your problem (assuming there was some end user training around applying the labels or parameters you could use to automatically apply them,) but given the increase in cost I think I would agree with Chris and Adam (great name btw), and just do something like insert a case number in every header/footer of a document, or email related to the work.
You could also create shared mailboxes for the explicit purpose of this (from the email side). You have a contract with company A, Project 7. Call it CompanyA-7@mydomain.com, and automatically include that in all communications. At the end of the project, everything in that box can be exported. Combine that with the document sets, and you would be good to go.The risk here is all of these (less so with labels, but its still there), really require your users to make sure they take the appropriate steps. In the same way they needed to make sure everything was saved in this folder of the file share, you just need to do some end user education once you decide what solution works for you.
Adam
- The issue I see with Labels, and from what I can tell, there isn't an easy way for end users to retrieve this data. I supposed you can act on the documents and move them into a central repository once the label date hits, that way you have a central location but you would have a gap there on the searching etc.
Agreed, I assumed an admin would be doing that for them at the completion of the project, but that could 100% be an incorrect assumption on my part.
