SharePoint Premium Solutions
Advanced document management and content intelligence with Microsoft SharePoint Premium. Transform how your organisation handles, processes, and manages content.
How a SharePoint Premium Project Runs
Content intelligence works when it is pointed at a specific, painful document problem. It disappoints when it is switched on across everything at once. Here is the sequence we use, and why each step exists.
1
Find out what you are actually storing
Most businesses genuinely do not know. We look at where documents live, how much is duplicated across personal drives and old file servers, what has not been opened in five years, and which libraries hold the material people search for every day. This is unglamorous and it is the step that determines whether everything after it works.
2
Agree the metadata that matters
Automatic classification only helps if the labels mean something to your business. For a builder that might be project, site, trade and document type. For a practice it might be client, matter and year. We keep this deliberately short, because a taxonomy with thirty fields is one nobody maintains and every one of them ends up blank.
3
Train the document models
We teach the content understanding models using your own documents, not generic samples. Contracts, invoices, purchase orders, safety records, whatever you handle in volume. The model learns to recognise the document type and pull out the fields you care about, such as the counterparty, the value, the expiry date or the site reference.
4
Test the extraction honestly
We run the models against a held-back set of your real documents and report accuracy plainly, including where they fail. Some document types classify very reliably; badly scanned handwritten forms do not. Knowing which is which up front lets you decide where to trust automation and where to keep a person checking.
5
Set retention, governance and permissions
Once documents are classified, retention and access rules can follow automatically rather than depending on someone filing correctly. Records that must be kept for a statutory period get kept. Material that should have gone years ago can finally go. We also close off the oversharing that tends to build up over a decade of quick sharing links.
6
Migrate, train and hand over
Migration runs in stages with the old location kept read-only until people are confident. Training focuses on the handful of habits that keep a library tidy rather than a tour of every feature. You get documentation covering what was configured, what the models do, and how to retrain one when your paperwork changes.
Honest Cost Guidance
There are two costs. Microsoft charges for the platform and for content processing, and much of that processing is consumption based, meaning you pay according to how many documents you actually run through it. That structure suits a smaller business well, because you can prove the value on one document type before committing to volume. We size expected usage with you and scope against current Microsoft pricing rather than publishing a figure that would be out of date within months.
Our work is scoped per project. What moves the number is how many document types you want models for, whether a migration from an old file server is in scope, how much permission remediation is needed, and how much of the training you want us to deliver. A single document type on a tidy tenant is a contained piece of work. Twenty years of an unmanaged shared drive is a programme.
Initial consultations are free for businesses with 20 or more full-time staff (smaller teams pay $200 including GST). Every engagement starts with a written scope and a fixed price.
Realistic Timelines
Discovery and agreeing the metadata takes one to two weeks. It goes faster in businesses that already have a shared vocabulary for their work and slower where every department names the same thing differently, which is worth resolving anyway.
Training and testing a model on a single document type typically takes two to three weeks, assuming you can supply a reasonable set of real examples. Poor quality scans are the most common reason this takes longer than expected.
A first document type is commonly in production within six to eight weeks. Migration from a legacy file server is a separate track and depends far more on how many decisions have to be made about old content than on the copying itself. We would rather run that in stages than promise a single cut-over date that nobody can hold.
Ready to Transform Your Document Management?
Tell us which pile of paperwork causes the most pain and we will tell you whether this is the right tool for it.
Initial consultations are free for businesses with 20 or more full-time staff (smaller teams pay $200 including GST).
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