Overview

Most organisations did not plan their Microsoft 365 setup. It grew. Someone created a Teams site for a project, someone else shared a folder to get a document out the door, and a few years later nobody can say with confidence where anything lives or who can see it.

These are the six problems we are asked about most often.

Nobody knows where company files should be saved

Staff save to OneDrive, to a Teams channel, to a SharePoint site, and sometimes still to a mapped network drive. Each choice is reasonable on its own. Together they mean no one can find a document without asking the person who made it.

The fix is a documented file structure with clear rules: personal drafts in OneDrive, team work in SharePoint, nothing important on a local desktop. It takes a decision, not new software.

SharePoint permissions are out of control

Permissions get granted in a hurry and never reviewed. Individual files are shared with individual people, inheritance gets broken, and external sharing links sit live for years. The result is an environment where no one can answer a simple question about who has access to what.

Permissions should be granted to groups, not people, and inherited from the site down. Anything else becomes unmanageable at scale.

Staff have multiple copies of the same files

When people are not confident a shared file will stay where they left it, they make their own copy. Now there are four versions of the same contract and no way to tell which one is current. This is a genuine risk in contract, tender and compliance work.

Co-authoring in a single location solves it, but only once staff trust that the single location is reliable and easy to reach.

If you cannot produce a list of who can reach your payroll folder, you cannot say your information is secure.

Too many Teams and SharePoint sites

Teams is easy to create and almost never deleted. Organisations we work with routinely have more Teams than staff, most of them dormant, each one carrying a SharePoint site and document library behind it.

Sprawl costs you search quality, storage and clarity. A provisioning process and a regular review of inactive sites keeps it in check.

We are paying for Microsoft licences nobody uses

Licences are assigned when someone joins and rarely reclaimed when they leave or change roles. It is also common to find staff on a licence tier well above what their work requires.

A licence review is one of the fastest pieces of work we do, and it usually pays for itself. The savings are ongoing, not one-off.

Nobody knows who has access to what

This is the sum of the five problems above, and it is the one that matters most when something goes wrong. If you cannot produce a list of who can reach your payroll folder, your client records or your board papers, you cannot say your information is secure, and you cannot demonstrate it to an auditor or an insurer.

How New Solutions can help

We start with an assessment of your current environment: sites, permissions, sharing links, licence allocation and where your data actually sits. You get a written picture of what exists today, including anything that needs attention immediately.

From there we agree a structure that suits how your organisation works, tidy permissions back to a group-based model, consolidate duplicate sites and content, remove sharing that should not be live, and right-size your licensing.

We also set up the things that stop it happening again: a request process for new Teams and sites, retention and sharing policies, and scheduled reviews so permissions and licences do not drift.

Most of this work is invisible to your staff. What they notice is that files are where they expect them to be.

Where to start

You do not need to fix all six at once. A Microsoft 365 assessment will tell you which of these is costing you the most, and what it will take to put right.

Get in touch to arrange one.