Help me adhere to best practices. Please!

Copper Contributor
I'm an Office 365 deployment engineer with 15 years of professional experience advocating and implementing Microsoft's cloud offerings. I've always seen the vision that the company had laid out, even when I didn't agree. But I am having difficulties with the modern SharePoint infornation architecture. I hope I just have blinders on and am missing something obvious.

Here is a very common scenario for clients I work with. A law firm has 10 attorneys, each with specialized areas of practice: civil, criminal, litigaton, business law, family law etc. For each area of practice an attorney does work, they have a set of documents that they use for templates, research etc. The firm itself also has it's own IT department, HR department, and firm legal department. The firm has clients, lawyers have clients individually or sometimes a couple of attorneys will share a client. Some clients may have 1 case that has one attorney. However some cases might have 10 clients and 3 attorneys (class action for example). Also some clients may have 300 cases with 1 attorney and some may have 300 cases with 4 different attorneys. To make things more complicated, a firm may have a case where 1 attorney has a conflict of interest requiring a "Chinese Firewall". Also add in paralegals, secretaries and other support staff.

I've had no issues creating this structure for years with the traditional site collection heirarchy. It's actually been a dream of a platform. However I am completely lost as to how I could possibly duplicate this in the modern flat site world.

It's very common for a small firm as described above to have 3-5,000 active cases for 1000 clients. Add to this another 10-50,000 archived cases and 5,000 clients. Some of which have 5 documents others that have thousands spanning 10 years.

How is this supposed to work? If it was a small one or two partner firm I could theoretically use the client as the hub site. And each case could be a site assigned to that hub, but that doesn't make sense because a case will never not be associated with that client. And we run into issues really fast as soon as the firm has 201 clients. As that's the ceiling for hub sites.

So I think okay we'll make the attorney the hub site and a client site an associated site. But then how do I separate different cases for clients that have 500 active cases. Some of these cases have thousands of documents. Some require permission firewalls for some cases. I could create a document library for each case, but there is no way to link custom lists and libraries to individual document libraries that I am aware of without custom development that is beyond the scope of what I am comfortable doing for such a key business solution. Espescially when this was easily handled in the old setup.

I thought about creating a hub for each legal specialty, but again I'm left with the situation where client sites would be a freaking disaster.

I just do not see a way in which this can work in a cohesive understandable manner. This is the abridged version by the way. I haven't even talked about workflows, retention policies, disposition of records.

If there was a way to nest hub sites, this could be viable if the hub site limit wasn't 200. I just feel like unless I'm missing something, I'm stuck with the classic SharePoint for the time being. I cannot be the only one who is facing this dilemma ? I don't see any focus on addressing this in the road map and I don't see any talk about this from my contacts at MS except for to say subsites are the devil. I have a reputation for providing clients solutions that are viable and will be supported into the future. And seeing things that were introduced in SharePoint 2013 already being classified as deprecated is a big red flag.

Don't get me wrong. For other clients and business models I absolutely love the new modern design and implementation. And I'm selling it and hoping it wherever possible.

I hope I'm just oblivious to something, I admit to sometimes being unable to look outside of my comfort zone and jumping to a "sky is falling" mentality.

3 Replies
Is SharePoint the correct choice for your collaboration or should this be in Teams?

You need to distinguish corporate intranet (durable/permanent) from workgroups and projects (ephemeral). Communication and hub sites are for corporate intranet - it's where employees go to find HR policies or order a new laptop from IT. Microsoft Teams is for projects and people.

 

I would set up a communication site (aka public publishing site) as the hub for each "Family" in  your organization - IT, HR, and each area of practice. This gives each group a place to put information aimed at the entire firm about "who we are and what we do". Make sure you establish navigation across the hubs so people can get from one "family" of content to another.

 

Then you move to Microsoft Teams. I would have the lead attys for each case set up a Team for that. This will give them an O365 group for Planner, Stream, etc. As they add people to the case, those people will be able to see each case in Teams when they open it. They can set up channels for each aspect or topic of a case. People can then choose to follow/not follow a channel based on whether they are involved in that aspect of the case. This goes a long way towards cutting down on email notifications for stuff you don't care about. Teams can be archived when the case is finished. These sites do not HAVE to be attached to a hub site, but they may choose to. 

 

IT, HR, etc. will need a workspace and they may be OK with Teams or regular team template sites with email. I would let them choose.

Teams is SharePoint. It's just a different UI.