Compliance and Document Collection with External Parties

Distributing and collecting documents with external parties can be challenging, particularly as the number of documents and parties expands. The OOTB Request Files feature in OneDrive is fantastic for simple document collection from external parties, however it can be challenging to scale to a larger scenario. The same can apply to the OOTB external sharing features in SharePoint Online.

Here are some of the scenarios we’ll be discussing in this session:

• Collecting monthly, quarterly, annual, and audit financial reporting from a large number of subsidiaries
• Distributing and tracking emergency preparedness plans to first responders and municipalities across a large geographic area
• Providing engineering drawing packages for customer review and approval, and providing the ability to upload change requests and modifications
• Collecting insurance certifications and code of conduct attestations from suppliers

Challenges to scaling solutions like this are:

• Providing dashboards to track compliance around both receipt and upload of documents according to a planned schedule
• Email alert notifications
• Approval workflows
• Providing a simple user experience for external users who may not be familiar with Microsoft 365

Solutions we’ll review are:

• OOTB OneDrive Request Files and SharePoint external sharing
• SharePoint webpart to simplify the drag and drop and tagging of uploaded documents
• Customer portal outside of but integrated with Microsoft 365 to provide a simple, branded user experience
• Workflows for uploaded file renaming, metadata, and security specific to the business requirements
• Power BI dashboards to provide visuals of compliance according to a number of filters (customer, project, compliance, etc.)
• External access through Azure AD B2B and Extranet User Manager