SharePoint Portal with Document Collaboration

What is Document Collaboration?

A typical requirement for a customer or vendor portal is the ability to share and collaborate on documents. Such things as contracts, technical specifications, or forms are to shared and filtered such that each user only has access to the documents that belong to them.
Add Contract Management to Your Office 365 Customer Portal

The Need for Document Collaboration

The desire for this feature has arisen from our clients that want to share such information in a scalable fashion right from Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive.  The examples of the type of documents are endless but here are some of the more common instances:

Customer Portal

  • Sales contracts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Licensing agreements
  • Onboarding documents
  • Financial details such as banking information, ACH, or credit card authorization

Vendor Portal

  • Request for proposals
  • Vendor contracts
  • Technical specifications
  • W-9 and other government forms
  • NDAs, non-competes, data privacy and other onboarding documents

In addition to just sharing documents, other features such as workflow, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and version control are desired. Simple document sharing can expand into entire document collaboration processes.

The Challenge

While sharing documents from a SharePoint business-to-business (B2B) extranet has always been available, it becomes a little challenging managing this for a large volume of users. It requires either setting up separate sites for each customer and vendor or using elaborate permission models to restrict access. Both of these options are viable for limited users, but it gets more complex when you try to scale. Governing all of these sites and permission can also pose a security risk as the possibility for unauthorized access increases. We have heard from many that this was a significant obstacle for them to use Office 365 for document sharing outside of their organization.

The Solution

While DynamicPoint has long provided its customer and vendor portal app that enables the secure sharing of business data, documents continued to be a challenge. That is why we expanded our portal framework to include document libraries as well. Now any document that resides in SharePoint, OneDrive, or Teams can be displayed on the portal using highly secure and configurable filtering. Our portal app will automatically retrieve and display only the documents that are applicable to the logged-in customer or vendor. This filtering can be achieved using any of the attributes of the document. This includes limiting results based on any field, folder structure, or even data that was extracted using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). By leveraging SharePoint document security, integrated OCR, Power Automate workflows and the DynamicPoint portal application, you get the powerful combination to enable document collaboration within your Office 365 environment.