If your SharePoint environment feels cluttered, inconsistent, or impossible to govern, this episode is your turning point. We break down why SharePoint hoards content, why search results often surface the wrong “final” version of documents, and how that chaos degrades Microsoft Copilot accuracy. More importantly, we walk through a practical, admin-approved, politically safe solution that offloads stale drafts and duplicates to Azure Blob Storage—without breaking collaboration or trust. This episode is a deep dive for SharePoint administrators, Microsoft 365 architects, IT leaders, governance teams, and organizations frustrated by poor search precision, ballooning storage quotas, and confused users who keep opening the wrong document. What You’ll Learn in This Episode 1. Why Your SharePoint Is Lying to You (and Not on Purpose) SharePoint looks confident—Copilot too—but your environment may be full of near-duplicate drafts like Final_v2_REAL_FINAL.docx, pseudo-archives, and outdated copies that bury the true canonical document.
We explore:
- Why humans hoard files and systems comply
- How duplicates distort search ranking signals
- Why Copilot “hallucinates” less than you think—it’s just reading the wrong files
- The hidden governance risk when multiple versions contradict each other
This section gives you the “aha” moment: you don’t have a storage problem; you have a relevance problem. 2. How Versioning, Copies, and Friendly Hoarding Destroy Search and Governance You’ll learn how:
- Every file version increases your SharePoint quota footprint
- Automatic version pruning helps—but only within a file
- Copies, renamed drafts, and “Archive” folders create epistemic fog
- Search ranking gets confused by similar titles, metadata, and click patterns
- Copilot inherits that same confusion
We also cover why deleting duplicates is politically dangerous—and how fear, not laziness, drives users to create shadow copies. 3. The Architecture That Fixes Everything (and Doesn’t Start a User Revolt) We break down a simple, scalable architecture that quarantines junk without deleting it:
- SPFx ListView Command Set — adds “Move to Blob” right inside modern libraries
- Azure Function — performs fast, server-to-server copy
- Azure Blob Storage — the cheap, durable “warehouse district”
- Azure Table Storage — the audit ledger that remembers every move
You’ll learn why:
- Browsers should not copy files—servers should
- Blobs are ideal for tiered, long-term storage
- A hash-verified copy ensures data integrity
- Quarantine beats deletion every time
- The design dramatically improves search precision and Copilot quality
4. The Permission Choice That Admins Actually Approve This is the part that saves the project from dying in security review. We’ll explain:
- Why Application permissions (e.g., Sites.Read.All) trigger instant rejection
- Why delegated permissions + On-Behalf-Of flow get approved
- How the SPFx command passes a user token
- How the Function acts as the user, not a global superuser
- How this satisfies least privilege, clean audit trails, and governance
This alone has saved implementations months of waiting. 5. Identification Rules: Finding Duplicates, Stale Drafts, and Fake Archives Before moving anything, you need a scoring model that users and compliance trust. We cover:
- How to detect duplicates using content hashing
- How to identify obsolete drafts
- How to score files by last access, edit frequency, age, and duplication weight
- Why dry-run reporting reduces fear
- How to let owners approve or deny flagged items
This is practical, not theoretical—listeners can apply these rules today. 6. Offload Workflow: Copy, Verify, Log, Delete—with Receipts We walk step-by-step through...
