SharePoint for Construction: Document Control for Drawings, Specs, and Contract Docs

A GC faces a construction defect claim four years after substantial completion. The attorney asks for the submittals, RFIs, daily logs, meeting minutes, and drawing revisions from the relevant period. The PM who ran the job has left the company. The project server was decommissioned. The documents exist somewhere across old laptops, archived email accounts, and a file server nobody has organized since the project closed. Assembling the document production takes three months of paralegal time at $200/hour. Several critical RFIs can't be found. The opposing counsel notices the gap. This scenario — which plays out at construction companies constantly — is the direct result of treating project documentation as a file storage problem rather than a records management discipline.

Construction SharePoint done right is built like a document control system from day one. Project sites created from a template with standard libraries for contract documents, drawings (current revision only), submittals, RFIs, ASIs, daily logs, meeting minutes, and correspondence. Version control on every document. Metadata that includes project, discipline, date, and status. Retention policies that archive project sites on closeout and retain them for the statute of limitations period (typically 6-12 years depending on jurisdiction). eDiscovery readiness for the inevitable dispute. And the governance model that prevents the drift into file-dump patterns that make documents unfindable three years later.