Drowning in your shared drives? How to turn the tide

Mastering shared drives is a problem that has plagued Records Managers for years. With limited controls, it’s easy for their contents to spiral out of control, meaning that we don’t know what we hold, where it is, or if we should have deleted it already. We might want to sail to new horizons with M365, but we cannot abandon our legacy systems, especially if we want to migrate valuable content.

At the IOPC, we have embarked on an audit of our shared drives, identifying material to keep, delete and permanently preserve on a team-by-team basis. We are reviewing over 2 million files on a limited budget in order to carry out destruction and prepare for a migration to SharePoint. I will present our methodology for this audit, as well as the lessons we have learned, offering practical advice for others looking to survive and thrive in the Shared Drive Seas.