~80 employees, 10+ network drives, no conventions. The mandate was to migrate to SharePoint. The opportunity was to build something that actually worked.
Fig. 1 — ACRO SharePoint Homepage · Company-wide entry point with department navigation
ACRO ran on 10+ mapped network drives — G, I, J, K, L, Q, T, X, Z, and others — each evolved independently, without structure or ownership. Departments had their own drives but also saved to shared ones. Personal folders lived next to company-wide resources with no separation. Nobody had a clear mental model of where to look for anything. Nobody was wrong to be confused.
When a new employee asked where to save a file, they got a different answer from every person they asked. Nobody was lying — everyone had built their own working model of a system that had no real structure.
The rule eliminates ambiguity at the system level. Users don't guess which drive to check — they know whether they need a company form (Resources) or a department document (Team Site), and that answer is always the same.
Rather than arriving with a structure, discovery was designed to surface what already existed — how people actually worked, where files actually lived, and what the pain points actually were. A 14-person survey went across Engineering, Sales, Admin, Machining, and Shop. Stakeholder meetings with department leads followed. Every mapped drive was inventoried: file types, ownership, and SharePoint readiness.
"Even after working at ACRO for 10 months, it is challenging to find documents that I need to use fairly frequently like design standards."
Sophia Meinshausen — Mechanical Engineering"Wanted to know our most profitable jobs over the last 5 years. This cannot be compiled."
Todd Schilling — Sales"A migration is a design opportunity. The mess wasn't random — it was the company's latent information architecture waiting to be made intentional."
The biggest failure mode in an enterprise file system is ambiguity: people don't know where to look, files get duplicated, and no version is ever clearly the right one. The two-tier architecture was built on one rule — company-wide files live in Resources; department-specific files live in Team Sites. That rule makes every file decision obvious. There's no grey area, no "which version is current."
Departments were not asked to let someone organize their files for them. They were given the destination structure and the responsibility to clean their own drives before migration. This is change management as design: if a third party organizes it, nobody owns it. Adoption fails when people feel a system was done to them rather than with them.
SharePoint Homepage · April 2026
IT Department Team Site · May 2026
This case study is being built in real time. The architecture is designed and deployed. Department migrations are rolling out in phases. Outcomes — adoption rates, time-to-find improvement, reduction in "where is X?" requests — will be logged here as data becomes available and the migration progresses through remaining departments.