Stop Losing Files in Your Own Company
Teams and SharePoint designed with a structure people can navigate, permissions you can explain, and governance that keeps it usable eighteen months from now.
45 min · Free · No commitment
Four copies of the contract and nobody knows which is current
Teams makes it trivially easy to create a new team, and SharePoint creates a site behind every one. Nobody deletes anything. Within two years you have a hundred and forty teams, half of them abandoned after a single project, and the current version of an important document exists in four places with no way to tell which is authoritative.
Then the permissions problem arrives. Files get shared with "anyone with the link" because it was faster than working out the right group. A contractor from last spring still has access to a finance folder. Nobody can answer who can see what, which is a problem that becomes urgent the moment a client or auditor asks.
Facet MSP designs the structure first — where things live, who owns each space, how it is named, and when it gets archived — then implements permissions through groups rather than individual shares, and reviews them on a schedule so the environment stays navigable.
Structure, permissions, and lifecycle
Information Architecture Design
A deliberate map of where content lives — by department, by client, by project — with naming conventions and clear ownership. The single highest-leverage thing you can do, and almost always the step that gets skipped.
Permission Model & Access Reviews
Access granted through groups rather than one-off individual shares, so it can be reasoned about and revoked cleanly. Reviewed on a schedule, with external sharing reported so surprises surface early.
Teams Governance
Controls on who can create teams, required naming, mandatory owners, and an archival policy for teams that go quiet. Ungoverned sprawl is what makes the environment unusable, not the volume of files.
File Migration & Consolidation
Moving content off local file servers, personal OneDrives, and consumer Dropbox accounts into a governed structure — with permissions mapped deliberately rather than copied verbatim from whatever existed before.
External Sharing Controls
Guest access configured so collaborating with a client is easy and accidentally publishing a folder to the internet is not. Link expiry, domain restrictions, and reporting on what is currently shared out.
Retention & Legal Hold
Retention policies that keep what you must keep and dispose of what you should not, plus litigation hold where your industry or counsel requires it. Particularly relevant for regulated and professional services clients.
Adoption Support
Short, practical guidance for your team on where things go and why. A perfect structure nobody understands gets bypassed within a month, and then you have two systems instead of one.
People find things on the first try
- One authoritative location for every document
- Permissions you can explain to a client or an auditor
- Abandoned teams and sites get archived, not accumulated
- External sharing is deliberate and visible
- Departing staff lose access cleanly and completely
- Retention obligations are handled by policy, not by memory
Structure before migration
We design before we move anything.
Lifting a messy file server into SharePoint gives you a messy SharePoint with worse search. The structure has to be decided first, which takes a conversation rather than a tool.
Permissions go through groups, always.
Individual file shares are unreviewable at scale. Group-based access is what makes "who can see this" an answerable question a year later.
We plan for the cleanup nobody wants to do.
Archival and retention get decided at design time, because no organization voluntarily spends a quarter deleting old teams later.
Teams and SharePoint questions
Can you just move our file server into SharePoint?
We can, but a straight lift usually disappoints — you inherit the old folder tree, the old permissions, and worse search than you had before. The migration goes considerably better after a short design exercise about where content should live.
Our Teams sprawl is already out of control. Is it recoverable?
Yes. The usual approach is inventory first — what exists, who owns it, when it was last touched — then archive the clearly dormant, consolidate duplicates, and apply governance so it does not immediately regrow. It is a project, not a switch.
How do we share files with clients safely?
Guest access into a specific team or site, scoped to what they need, with link expiry and a record of what is shared externally. It is materially safer than emailing attachments, and considerably safer than an anyone-with-the-link URL that lives forever.
Should we use OneDrive or SharePoint?
OneDrive for genuinely individual work in progress; SharePoint and Teams for anything shared or belonging to the business. The common failure is business-critical documents living in a personal OneDrive, which becomes an access problem the day that person leaves.
Will our team actually use it?
Only if the structure is obvious and someone explains it. That is why adoption support is part of the work rather than an upsell — a technically perfect environment that people route around has not solved anything.
Ready to take this off your plate? Six questions.
Spend 90 seconds answering. We'll spend a few hours putting together a written assessment of where your IT stands — and a 45-minute call with one of our engineers.