To be a valuable tool, the audit needs to be comprehensive and give you the right level of detail for your project. In this post, we’ll share our recommendations on how to complete a content audit for Microsoft 365 or SharePoint projects. With this crucial information at hand, you can better design a system for the kinds of content employees want to engage with and get the results you and your organization truly need.
Audits are not all the same. It's important to get clear on the outcome of your audit and how it will inform the work you intend to do, so you can set up the right structure and capture the information you need.
Sometimes you’ll be asked explicitly to complete an audit as a precursor to a project. This is particularly true if you’re building a new system and need to migrate content into the system before launch. In this case, an audit can help you understand the true scope of the project you're about to undertake.
In other circumstances, you may only hear hints about friction in your organization. For instance, users may share that the search function either doesn’t return useful results or it returns too many results to wade through. In that case, content hygiene, not search, is more likely to blame, and an audit can help with clean up.
Massive organizational changes such as an acquisition, close-out of line of business or a significant shift in leadership direction, can also trigger a need to look more closely at your content. In these scenarios, you'll often need look at the actual copy contained on pages and documents to determine if the material is still relevant in the new context.
Finally, an audit can help if you have a technical need to move off a soon-to-be unsupported system or if there are storage or back-up constraints in your current system. In this case, your audit will help you track what needs to be moved and what should be deleted or archived, as well as plan for managing the permissions and security needed before and after the move.
Engage with people in your organization who have expertise in content or records management. They can help you get your content audit off to a good start.
To get started, reach out to your IT team, who can provide you with inventory reports on the content you wish to audit. They may choose to use some of the standard Microsoft reports, or you may need them to create PowerShell or reporting scripts or make use of an inventory tool like AvePoint Fly Server to get the details you want.
Always ensure that these reports are run by someone with the proper administrative permissions; otherwise, you might miss content where unique permissions have been applied.
Audits should be done for the broadest level of content organizational structures – for SharePoint that's usually at the site level – and then as needed for more granularity. If you can make decisions about all the content contained in a site (or at least some large subset of it) together, you’ll save yourself and your content owners a lot of effort.
Sites or content that haven’t been updated recently or accessed regularly may be targets for deletion or archiving. It’s helpful to set some base criteria you’ll use for doing broad sweeps initially. For example, you can decide not to look in detail at content older than five years, unless it belongs to a specific area.
To save time, evaluate your content at the site-level first instead of trying to look at every individual page or document.
While you’re working with your IT team to get your inventories complete, you can also reach out to some of the owners of the big content areas and start to get them on your side. You’ll need to be able to communicate what they’re going to be asked to do, the timing, and potential commitment needed for the content review. Content owners will need to be able to answer questions about whether the content is up to date and still relevant to the organization.
Build out some easy-to-use tools to capture the decisions made by content owners. Shared spreadsheets or SharePoint lists are usually the best options since you’ll likely have multiple people providing their input. Within these tools, be specific about what decisions need to be captured and where.
GO is our customizable intranet powered by Microsoft 365 and integrated with Viva Connections.
Where possible, fill in as much of the information before asking content owners for their input. Rarely will content owners have the time needed to complete an audit, so ensure you use their time as wisely as possible.
Completing a content audit is an important piece of the puzzle to help you thoughtfully build out your future intranet or collaboration experience. We can get you started with our content audit template, but we’d also love to hear from you to see how we can help.