SharePoint Customer Portals

The kalmstrom.com team has helped the US business advisory firm Alexander Remington International Associates, Inc. (ARI) to migrate lots of documents from a cloud based file storage system into SharePoint. Here are glimpses of that project.

One site per customer

ARI's main request was that kalmstrom.com would build site collections to be used by the ARI customers, so that each customer had their own site collection.

The homepage of each site displays a summary of all document libraries in that collection. The sites are then intended to be customized with additional resources, like instructional videos, links and other self-service features.

The kalmstrom.com team created the sites and moved all data from the earlier cloud based file storage system into SharePoint libraries in different site, in general one library for each folder in the earlier storage system.

We also added a custom SharePoint Search Center to perform a smooth search.

Authentication and Permissions

The customers log in to their sites with their free Microsoft accounts, so there is no SharePoint Online license fee for them.

We added two groups with different permissions to the sites, one for ARI employees and one for their customers.

In general, the customers have permission to upload documents only to one library, called Inbox, but they can search and read documents in the other libraries. The employees are the people who administer the sites, so they must of course have full rights.

PowerShell to migrate data

A PowerShell script helped us migrate all the existing files, from the folders in the file storage system to each customer’s specific document libraries. There were so many files that a manual transfer would have been practically impossible, but once the PowerShell script had been constructed the process was quick.

SharePoint sets a new created day when you upload files to document libraries, but with our PowerShell script the original created dates of the files were retained.

Let us assist you!

This project is just an example on how the kalmstrom.com team can help organizations build an efficient system for content management. Please contact us if you want to discuss a change within your own organization. You don’t need to know the solution to your problem – that is our job! Just tell us what you are discontent with, and we will find a better process for you.