It was decided to build a corporate portal on SharePoint 2019 platform that would be used as an archive and a document management system. The portal is intended to be used both by employees of the organization and its subsidiaries, and for interaction with external contractors (when an appropriate access is provided).

The documents archive on the portal is structured in a form of projects. All the documentation stored on the portal was grouped under a certain project, document type or a contractor to which it is related.

The SharePoint portal has a single-entry point from which a user can go to all other sub-sites and directories. At the same time, each sub-site can be accessed by entering its address and bypassing the main site. These sub-sites store all the documentation related to a certain project.

To organize documents storage on each site, documents libraries were created. Each library corresponds to:

• The department’s type of work (for the technical department of the project site);
• The contractor (for the financial and legal departments of the project site);
• The type of a document or a contractor (for the sub-sites).

The employee’s address book uses information from the standard user profiles in the company’s domain. Profiles data update and organization of the access to the portal occurs by synchronization with the company’s domain.

To systematize the storage of the documents and to simplify the work with them, several types of documents were defined on the portal. Document type – required metadata field when uploading materials to the portal. To detail the classification of the documents, improve the search and status tracking, additional document metadata was provided. When uploading each document, a user may specify values for these fields – attributes. If necessary, these attributes can be easily edited by users. Using these attributes, documents can be quickly found using the search.

An opportunity to track related documents within the system was provided. For the convenience of working with the documents, related documents are presented to users as a result of a search query.

Shared access to documents and notifications were implemented: users can share with other people both certain documents as well as whole folders. Access can be granted to both individual users and groups of users. Access can grant only reading permission or reading and editing permissions. Access to sites and libraries is provided only to portal administrators.

The search was organized in two forms: standard and advanced. The standard form makes it possible to find documents by name of a document and by text in the document. The Advanced Search form allows to use the following search criteria: by a contractor name, if it is specified; by details of the Agreement, if indicated; by the Year of the document, if indicated; by type of the document.

To store many large documents and to speed up their indexing and search, Blob-storage was set up.

As the system has many components and is used heavily, it was decided to build a server farm. At the moment, there are 3 servers, one is used for the database, two others are for SharePoint. The farm is designed to be scalable. Once the company decides to transfer all their documents to this new system, it will be possible to expand the system to 5-6 servers, where one of the servers can be responsible for documents indexing and thus speeding up the search.

SharePoint portal numbers:

• Currently, there are 60-80 main users of the system. However, potentially, it might be accessed by up to 300 users. The portal was planned the way it would scale up when needed
• A few tens of contractors have access to certain libraries of the portal
• The total number of documents is about 500 000, most of them are large detailed contracts of 30-50 Mb
• The total amount of data in the new system is 1.5 Tb, however, in future, the remaining 3.5Tb will be also transferred there