An Engineering Consulting Firm Automates External SharePoint Access for Every New Project With Files.com

A global engineering and technical consulting firm works across forensics, engineering and construction, healthcare, industrial, and product development, from offices worldwide.

All of that work is organized as discrete jobs. Each engagement is its own project, with its own SharePoint site, its own files (AutoCAD drawings, PDFs, photos, video, audio), and its own set of outside parties: the client, counsel, consultants, vendors. The firm opens well over a hundred new projects every working day, and its project managers engage third parties from the first hour. The firm set itself a blunt requirement to match: within 15 minutes of a job being created, people outside the firm need a working way to send the project files and receive them back.

The firm selected Files.com as the exchange layer and built the share path into project creation itself. The same pipeline that provisions each SharePoint site also provisions its Files.com access.

External Access Was Built by Hand, One Project at a Time

Standing up that access was manual. For every project, user accounts, folders, and permissions were created by hand or by bespoke PowerShell, and the firm wanted one firm-wide standard in place of per-unit tooling. One-off sharing ran through an SFTP server the team maintained itself, over links that expired on a fixed 7-to-14-day timer: staff selected the files, dropped them in, generated a link, sent it, and repeated the whole exercise when the clock ran out.

The firm also wanted the lifecycle to run in both directions: access granted automatically when a project opens, and removed just as automatically when it closes.

The cost landed on the people closest to the client. A project manager kicking off a job needed IT work done before the client could send the first file, and at that volume of new projects, that put a standing internal queue between the firm and the opening hours of every engagement.

Scale ruled out fixing it with more effort. The firm has tens of thousands of active SharePoint project sites, one per job, out of far more created over the years, and the count grows daily. SharePoint is also the system of record: project files are collected and worked on there, so any exchange platform had to deliver into it rather than hold a second copy beside it. Anything that needed a person per project, or a separate connection per site, would have collapsed under the volume on day one.

What a Firm-Wide Standard Had to Do

As project volume grew, the firm needed one standard electronic path for exchanging files with outside parties, as part of a broader transformation agenda to standardize how the firm operates.

That standard had a specific shape. It had to sit on top of SharePoint rather than beside it, so project data was never duplicated into a second system. It had to be drivable entirely through an API, so provisioning could run as a step inside the existing project pipeline instead of a console task done per job. It had to reach tens of thousands of sites without per-site configuration. It had to give outside parties credentialed access scoped to their own project, plus a way in for the one-off sender who will never hold an account. And it had to take access away at project close as automatically as it granted it.

Provisioning Files.com From the Same Script That Builds the Project

When a job is created in the firm’s ERP, existing Graph API and PnP PowerShell scripts provision the project’s SharePoint site. The enterprise applications team extended that same pipeline to call the Files.com REST API and CLI in the same run: mount the new site into Files.com, create the folders and external user accounts, and apply the permissions.

The mount is what keeps SharePoint the system of record. Using Files.com Remote Server Mounts, each project site appears as a Files.com folder while the files stay in SharePoint, so a file a client uploads through Files.com lands directly in that project’s SharePoint folder. And because every project site follows one naming convention keyed to the job number, a single system-level Entra ID connection to the SharePoint tenant covers the entire estate. Mounting the next project is a path under a connection that already exists, not a new credential to configure. That is the property that makes the daily volume survivable.

Access follows the ERP. The permissions applied at provisioning inherit from job assignment, so a person who logs in sees the projects assigned to them and nothing else, and an outside party’s credentials reach only the folders for their job. Counterparties with an ongoing role get a credentialed portal account; for the one-off sender, Files.com share links and inboxes take a file in with no account and place it in the correct project folder.

The lifecycle runs in both directions. When a project closes, the same automation removes its external users, so access ends when the job does.

The Share Path Became a Property of the Project

With the Files.com provisioning live inside the project pipeline, the firm replaced a per-project setup task with a pattern that applies itself.

• Every new project carries its own external exchange path from the moment it exists. The 15-minute requirement is met by construction, at the full daily rate of new projects, with no request to IT in between.
• Client files arrive straight into the project’s SharePoint folder, whether they come through a credentialed account, a share link, or an inbox. Nobody selects files, stages them on an SFTP server, and regenerates a link when it expires.
• Access is revoked by the same automation that granted it, so a closed project carries no live external accounts.
• Every business unit runs the same pattern. The firm-wide standard exists because the pipeline enforces it, not because a policy asks for it.

The compounding result is what the next project costs. One connection and one naming convention reach the whole estate, so each new site is mounted by path the moment the script runs, without adding per-site connection or credential configuration as the count of active sites climbs. External file exchange now scales at whatever rate the firm opens jobs, which is the rate the business grows.

The share path stopped being something IT does for a project and became something a project has.