A few years ago I started working with a client who needed help migrating their on-premises estate onto SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Teams, on paper, a routine migration but once you start you realise there’s no such thing as a routine SharePoint Migration. Tooling is different, sites are different and different business areas have different needs and priorities when it comes to their day to day files.
That gap — between how Microsoft 365 looks in the documentation and how it behaves in a real tenant with real history and real users — is where I’ve spent most of my working life. It’s also what this blog is about.
Microsoft’s documentation will tell you what the buttons do. This blog is about what happens when you press them in a 500-site tenant.
Who I am
I’m Chris Mitchell, a Digital Workplace Consultant with a focus on Microsoft 365 based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Over the last 15-plus years I’ve worked across financial services, energy, retail banking and housebuilding — usually sitting in the space between what the business needs and what the technology can actually deliver.
These days I run my own consultancy, CJM Projects, and my hands-on work covers the breadth of a modern Microsoft 365 estate: SharePoint Online, Intune, Entra ID, the Power Platform, and a growing amount of Azure Automation gluing it all together. I’ve managed tenants with hundreds of sites and tens of terabytes of content, and I’ve learned that the technical problem is rarely the whole problem. The interesting work is almost always in the translation layer — turning “we need better document management” into something you can actually build, govern and hand over.
Outside of work you’ll find me following motorsport, rugby and Scottish football (sadly), or tinkering with a home server that has absolutely more containers running on it than any household requires.
What this blog covers
The content falls into five broad pillars, all grounded in live project work rather than lab demos:
SharePoint, Teams and their associated applications. Migrations, storage governance, version history sprawl, and archiving at scale — including what it actually takes to get millions of files under control.
Identity and automation. Entra ID, dynamic groups, PowerShell, the Graph API, and Azure Automation runbooks — the plumbing that turns manual admin into something repeatable.
Copilot and the AI workplace. Pragmatic adoption, readiness, and governance. No hype, no “AI will change everything” think-pieces — just what it takes to deploy these tools safely.
Endpoint management. Intune, Autopilot, update rings, application deployment, and the gotchas that only surface when policies meet a real device estate.
The consultant’s view. Governance, stakeholder management, and making the business case. The parts of the job that never appear in a Microsoft Learn module but decide whether a project succeeds.
The format
New posts land regularly, alternating between three main types.
Practical posts are the deep ones — 1,500 words or more, sometimes with working scripts you can lift and adapt. Think full walkthroughs: designing a three-tier archiving model, taming version history.
“From the Field” posts are shorter and sharper — one problem, one fix, drawn directly from live engagements (suitably anonymised). The Edge policy setting that silently behaved differently than expected. The font that deployed perfectly to the desktop and vanished in the browser. The kind of thing you’d otherwise lose a Tuesday afternoon to.
I also hope to be able to help people keep up with what’s new in Microsoft 365 which as we all know seems to get new features every few days! It’s almost an impossible task to keep on top of that for all but I will try with a focus on the main areas that interest me, SharePoint, Teams, Copilot and the Power Platform.
Who this is for
If you’re an M365 administrator firefighting a growing estate, an IT manager trying to decide what to modernise next, or a fellow consultant who wants a sanity check that it’s not just your clients — you’re in the right place.
What you won’t find here is beginner tutorials or certification cram content. There are excellent resources for both elsewhere.
What’s coming next
First up will be my overview of the new Microsoft 365 archiving tools; I’ve personally been working with a client in the last couple of months to rollout the preview file-level archive tooling, moving significant amounts of data into cold storage and helping save them tens of thousands in SharePoint overage costs.
If that sounds useful, subscribe via RSS or connect with me on LinkedIn — and if there’s a topic you’d like covered, get in touch. Half the best posts start as someone else’s awkward problem.
Thanks for reading.
Chris