SharePoint and CDE setup

Almost every construction business already pays for SharePoint, and almost none of them use it well. Files are scattered across personal drives, project folders that only their creator understands, and half-abandoned sites from projects that finished two years ago. Nobody trusts the latest version is really the latest version. That mess is not just annoying. It is the single biggest blocker to getting value from AI, because a model can only be as good as the information it can reach and rely on.

A common data environment is the structured, single source of truth for project information, and getting it right is unglamorous, essential groundwork. We set up or straighten out your SharePoint and CDE so it reflects how construction projects actually run: clear separation between work in progress, shared, published and archived information; a consistent folder logic that a new starter can navigate without a phone call; and file naming that follows a convention rather than a mood. This is aligned to the way ISO 19650 information management is meant to work in practice, without drowning you in jargon.

Permissions and governance are where most setups quietly fail. We design access so the right people can reach the right information and no one can accidentally delete or overwrite something that matters. Version control is configured so the current document is obvious and the history is intact for audit. Retention and archiving are handled so completed projects are preserved cleanly rather than clogging live workspaces. The result stands up when a client, an auditor or a solicitor asks to see it.

The deeper payoff is that a clean CDE is the foundation everything else we do sits on. AI document automation needs a reliable library to draw from. A searchable project record needs somewhere trustworthy to live. Workflow automation needs to know where things are and where they should go. Skip this step and every clever thing you build on top inherits the underlying mess. Do it properly and each later project starts from a known, well-organised baseline instead of a fresh pile of folders.

We work with your IT function or Microsoft partner rather than around them, and we document the structure so it is maintained after we leave rather than drifting straight back into chaos. Where useful, we set up templates so every new project is spun up from the same clean structure automatically, which is the only way structure survives contact with a busy delivery team.

For most clients this is the highest-leverage thing they can do before any AI work, because it turns scattered files into an asset the rest of the programme can build on.