I was recently brought into a client who is migrating a large amount of file share data into Sharepoint online. The only reason I was brought on was for my experience with Sharegate, not Sharepoint.
The data is about 1/3 moved already, and they have 2 people using sharegate to migrate subfolders from various file share drives. The data is sensitive data, and it's a very slow and complicated process before we can even begin to move each subfolder.
The thing is, they had NO ONE who knew anything about Sharepoint involved with this. They are basically creating a new Team site for every subfolder off the root of each file share drive, and then migrating that subfolder's data to that new site. They have hundreds of departments, and each department can have dozens of subfolders on various drive letters, each with their own separate permissions.
The exception to this is the T:. It is wide open to the entire company with no permissions set on it. They want to lift and shift the entire thing up to SPO as one large library, and then of course use Onedrive to sync it back to their desktops. There are a thousand subfolders off the root of T:, and who knows how many subfolders under them, (I haven't analyzed it yet, but its a LOT).
I was hired for my Sharegate experience, but now that they are aware I know Sharepoint they are asking me to design this T: site. I'm kind of stuck figuring out the best way to handle it. There's no way they are going to have a Team's group with then entire company (9k or so employees), so I don't think creating a Team Site is the best way to go. They also don't want any kind of Intranet-ish feel to this. Just a spot where data is stored. That's it.
I was debating about using a document center. This company doesn't use any versioning, or meta data, or anything even remotely like that. All they will do is sync this drive back to their Onedrive, and continue opening the files as if they were on a file share. The company doesn't have a SP Admin, or any plans to have anyone like that, so I doubt they are going to suddenly start using those features. They just want a file share like experience, but using SPO as the back end.
Any suggestions on what would be the best way to handle this? (Other than starting over :)
