Moving a team off shared logins onto a proper SharePoint foundation

The challenge

This professional services team had grown past the point their original setup could support. Email, files and calendar all ran through a single shared login, and their bookings system ran through a second shared login on top of that. Everyone signed in as the same account, for everything.

Files were being treated like a shared drive rather than a proper document management system. There was no real structure behind where things lived, just folders that had accumulated over time, and no way to tell who had actually made a change to a document, since every change was attributed to the same shared identity.

Version clashes were common, two people editing the same file at once with no visibility of each other, and no audit trail to untangle what had happened afterwards. When someone left the team, there was no clean way to remove their access, because their access wasn't really theirs, it was the shared login everyone else still needed.

None of this was unusual for a team that had grown organically without ever revisiting its Microsoft 365 foundation, but it left the business with no real security boundary between staff, no accountability for changes, and a growing risk the longer it continued.

Our approach

1. 01

   Running the SharePoint Foundation Workshops

   Rather than simply handing over a rebuilt system, we ran a series of live workshops with the team to design the new SharePoint foundation together, walking through how they actually worked day to day rather than assuming a generic structure would fit.

2. 02

   Designing the site structure

   We mapped a SharePoint site structure and document library layout based on how the team's work genuinely flows between them, replacing the accumulated folder tree with something that matches their real processes rather than historical habit.

3. 03

   Building an Owners, Members and Visitors access model

   In place of the shared logins, we designed a proper access model using SharePoint's standard Owners, Members and Visitors groups, mapped to security groups rather than individuals, so access is granted and removed at the group level using Microsoft 365's own patterns.

4. 04

   Planning the shared login retirement

   Retiring two shared logins that everything depends on isn't a same-day switch. We built a clear, staged plan covering both the email/file/calendar login and the bookings system login, sequencing the changes so the team keeps working without disruption while the shared logins are phased out.

The outcome

The team's access model has been rebuilt around security groups rather than individual or shared logins, so granting and removing access now follows a standard, repeatable Microsoft 365 pattern instead of everyone sharing one identity.

Document libraries are now mapped to how the team actually works, not the old folder tree that had built up over years without anyone stepping back to reconsider it.

There's now a clear, agreed plan to retire both shared logins for good, using proper Microsoft 365 patterns rather than a rushed cutover, giving the team a foundation that can actually support them removing someone cleanly when they leave.