If you have many M365 users and files, then you need to plan how to best connect people, information, and knowledge with required security and compliance. Your M365 architecture and setup – like in the picture below – should enable people to quickly go where they want to find what they need, but also ensure they stay safe.
At Infotechtion, we help companies establish a M365 information architecture as a foundation for automation. This often include the following components.
I will in this blog post cover how 01 Information Architecture and 02 Information Enrichment may look like for M365 to improve access and control of information.
The information architecture may be a combination of Communication sites that act as gateways to relevant Hub sites and other relevant resources, Hub sites that connect relevant SharePoint sites, and Microsoft Teams that work across relevant sites. Users can use search to find relevant information due to default metadata on sites, or navigate via Communication sites to relevant Hub sites and connected sites.
For this to work well and at scale, you need Microsoft Teams and site templates and provisioning for the most important Teams and sites to ensure they get the right access, sharing controls, default metadata, record labels, etc. The free open-source Infotechtion Teams Hub can be used to apply custom templates, naming, security, taxonomy, and compliance controls. The provisioning can be automatic for most sites, but some may require manual approval before connecting the site to the relevant Hub site.
Files stored via Teams on the site – or directly on the site – inherent automatically the default metadata set on site or specific folder. If the stored files have unique metadata, then this can automatically be extracted using SharePoint Syntex. If final files needs to be approved and/or moved to another Teams or site – or to a central archive, then this can be automated with PowerAutomate. Record labels can be set automatically based on store location or metadata.
All this means that users can store files without having to manually add any metadata, but they will benefit from the automatically added metadata when trying to find information. The metadata can be filters for basic search results, or metadata-based search using advanced search.
Some blog posts that may be interest:
