Project document management: best structure?

[joemillson]

Hi there,

I'm trying to move our organisation towards adopting SharePoint as our document management tool so we can use the power of metadata in helping us stay organised, particularly for our client project work.

We are an architecture and project management business, and have around 100 active projects at any one time. Some of our Clients have multiple projects.

I have set up a new 'Projects' SharePoint site, and registered that as a hub site. However, I am struggling to design the best SharePoint structure around that for what we need. In summary:

Currently:

• Our main document storage system is a local server, which has a 'Projects' folder.
• Each projects folder then has sub-folders for document / content types (eg Reports, Drawings etc)
• This setup is very inefficient due to a lack of structure, deep folders, and no permissions management.

Question:

• What's the best general structure for document management? Given that:
  • We run 100+ projects at any one time, and have Clients with more than one project.
  • Our internal team members will need to be able to selectively sync some project files to their OneDrive on desktop.
  • We need to be able to externally share files, or ideally a site with all a Clients project details, with clients / others.

Any thoughts / ideas would be much appreciated

Thanks

Joe

[#2]

@joemillson 

Good day. I thought we could share ideas. I am a project manager (not a SP admin or SME...yet) and we are digging into similar questions. 

We have had SP for a some time, but are now focusing on increased adoption. Currently in the planning and design phase, but our 'future' configuration may be: 1) Teams for internal collaboration 2) SP for documents 3) a separate SP site for external sharing. Still TBD at this point as there seems to be many considerations. For example, we are still learning the best practices for permissions and sharing and how they relate to security constraints.

So, have you made any decisions on your strategy? Any specific challenges or discoveries?

I look forward to further discussion. Cheers.

[#3]

@joemillson 

Hello, 

My recommendation is to first look at the facts regarding SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive extensibility (possibilities). We have up to 25 TB for each SP site (that is same for Teams, because SP is containing the data from MS Teams). In Teams, you can create up to 20 private channels (unique permissions for a specific folder), even creates a unique site within the team.

Hub sites are very important to simplify findability and structure your projects (Team sites) with each other, even though the permissions are different.

My recommendation, and I would gladly continue the discussion forward:

A team site for each customer, with channels for each project at that specific customer. 
However, if you have more than 100+ projects on the same team, then that could be difficult to maintain... Also, you would need internal structure to only have the right colleagues with the correct permissions. Because if everyone gets access to the 100+ projects, they would get difficulties with working with Teams.

Yours sincerely,
Aref Halmstrand

[#4]

Hi @joemillson and @Don_Swain 

Have you found a way to manage your projects within SharePoint and Teams? Can you share your way, please?