SharePoint Document Management System Based on 12,000+ Workflow Rules

Summary

A chemical manufacturer kept a lot of unconventional data — drawings, images, and engineering documents — unorganized on-premises, alongside conventional documents like contracts and reports. INNERLUXES implemented a SharePoint Online document management system that applies the Client's 12,000+ structuring and search rules through a custom tool, organizing everything into five metadata-tagged libraries with a custom revision-tracking scheme for secure, searchable cloud storage.

About the Client

The Client is a European chemical manufacturing company with 4,000 employees.

The Challenge

Due to the company's business specifics, the Client had a lot of unconventional data, such as drawings and images, kept unorganized on-premises. The Client needed a document storage solution that would ensure the structuring and secure storage of this data together with conventional documents like contract documentation and reports.

The Solution

After analyzing the Client's requirements, INNERLUXES implemented a SharePoint Online document management system for secure storage of the Client's data in the cloud. The team first migrated the Client's documents from a hard drive to OneDrive for Business and then to the project server. The Client provided 12,000+ rules defining how documents should be structured and searched across the storage, so INNERLUXES developed a specific tool to apply these rules when organizing documents into libraries and folders and searching them by metadata.

The Client's documents had a complex versioning system identified by figures, letters, and their combinations. Since SharePoint supports versions identified only by numbers, the Client and INNERLUXES agreed not to use the platform's built-in versioning. To enable version tracking, the team created five libraries for the Client's documents:

• Engineering documents.
• FBD (functional block diagram) documents.
• Issued documents and reports.
• Models and drawings.
• Vendor documents.

Within each library, INNERLUXES created two folders — Current Revisions (the latest versions) and Other (all the other versions). Each library had a set number of tags (usually six or seven) to enable search. After creating the storage, the team uploaded it to SharePoint Online.

The Results

• The SharePoint Online document management system helped the Client streamline document storage and processing.
• The storage gives the Client well-structured, easily searchable documents across the five libraries.
• This facilitated the Client's document-related business processes and increased productivity.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, Visual Studio Code, C#, CSOM, PowerShell.