James Crawford is the sole IT manager at Riverdale Regional Education Authority, a government body responsible for technology across 12 primary and secondary schools. Each school has its own SharePoint site collection inside a single Microsoft 365 tenant. James did not set most of them up. Over six years, individual school principals provisioned sites as they needed them, each with its own permission structure, naming conventions, and folder logic. Some schools have three document libraries. Two have more than forty.
By the time James ran his first tenant-wide storage report, the authority was using 87% of its allocated storage. Three site collections had no active site collection administrator. External sharing was enabled on four sites with no audit trail of who had been given access. Two sites contained files that had not been opened in over three years.
James's goal was not to merge every school into one enormous site. Different schools need different permission boundaries. His goal was to reduce sprawl, reclaim storage, establish consistent governance, and get the tenant into a state where one person could manage it without losing sleep.
Phase 1: Understanding what was actually there
The first task was visibility. James knew the tenant was messy; he did not know how messy, or where the biggest problems were. He used ShareMaster's Report Master to run three exports across all 12 site collections:
- A storage utilisation report ranked by site, showing current content size, version history size, and recycle bin consumption separately. This revealed that two school sites were being inflated by version history: a primary school's administration library had 18,000 versions across 400 documents because versioning had been left at the SharePoint default of 500 versions per file and the library had been active for five years.
- A permissions matrix for all sites, which flagged three sites where external guests still held contributor access despite leaving the authority more than 12 months earlier. One guest had been granted Edit access to a year 11 assessment folder and had not logged in since.
- A version count report showing the top 50 files by version count across the whole tenant. The top entry had 498 versions of a 4 MB Word document, meaning that single file was consuming nearly 2 GB of version history alone.
The reports gave James a ranked list of problems to fix. Rather than attempting everything at once, he used the data to sequence the work: storage first, then permissions, then structure.
Phase 2: Reclaiming storage before restructuring
James used Space Master's Version Trimmer across all 12 site collections before moving any content. His policy: keep the last 10 major versions per file, delete anything older. The trim ran across the tenant overnight and reclaimed 31 GB of storage. Three site collections dropped below 60% quota utilisation, giving the consolidation project room to move content without running into storage limits mid-migration.
He also used the Empty Folder Remover. Across the 12 sites, there were 1,847 empty folders, most of them created by teachers who had planned document structures that were never populated. These folders contributed nothing to storage but made the library views look chaotic and complicated the eventual migration because every empty folder had to be evaluated.
The Bulk Delete tool handled the dormant content. Three site collections had document libraries whose most recently modified file was dated more than three years earlier. Rather than migrating that content to the consolidated structure, James downloaded an archive copy and deleted the libraries outright. This alone removed 9 GB and eliminated three libraries that would otherwise have needed to be evaluated, mapped, and moved.
Learn more about Space Master storage tools
Phase 3: Fixing permissions before migrating
Moving content with bad permissions into a consolidated structure just concentrates the problem. James cleaned permissions on each site before running any content migration.
The Shared Links and Permissions tool exported all active sharing links across the tenant. James found 214 active external links across the 12 sites, some dating back to 2019. He bulk-removed all external sharing links that were more than 90 days old. For the remaining active links, he documented which external recipients would need to be re-sent a link after the content moved to its new location.
The three external guests with residual contributor access were removed from their respective sites directly through SharePoint's site settings. He then used Report Master to generate a clean post-remediation permissions snapshot for each site, so he had documentation of the state before migration started.
For the specifics of auditing and cleaning up external sharing, see the guide on how to audit and manage SharePoint shared links.
Phase 4: Consolidating the site structure
James's consolidation plan did not collapse all 12 schools into one site. Instead, he moved from 12 flat site collections to a hub-and-spoke model:
| Before | After | What moved |
|---|---|---|
| 12 independent site collections, no hub | 1 education authority hub site + 12 associated school sites | Hub navigation and branding applied; site content stayed in place |
| 4 schools each with 10+ document libraries, many overlapping in purpose | Each school site normalised to 6 standard libraries (Admin, Curriculum, Staff, Assets, Archive, Policies) | Content migrated between libraries within each site using Clone Master |
| 2 schools sharing content but in separate sites with no cross-site links | Shared curriculum content consolidated into one library on the hub site | Content copied cross-site using Clone Master; permissions set on the new shared library |
| 3 site collections with no active site collection administrator | James assigned as site collection admin; school principal assigned as secondary admin | No content moved; governance only |
Clone Master handled the cross-site content moves within the tenant. For each library being restructured, James ran a preview pass first, verified the file count and metadata columns matched expectations, then executed the move. Clone Master preserved content types, column values, and version history throughout.
The outcome
The project ran over eight weeks alongside James's regular support duties. The tenant started at 87% storage utilisation and ended at 52% after version trimming, content deletion, and the elimination of duplicate libraries. The number of external sharing links dropped from 214 active links to 31 current, documented ones. Every site collection now has at least two named administrators. External sharing is disabled on six sites where it was never needed.
More practically: James can now run a tenant-wide storage and permissions report in under 20 minutes and understand the state of every school's SharePoint environment without logging into each site individually. That visibility is the thing that makes ongoing governance possible for a team of one.