From Folder Sprawl to Faceted Search: Rebuilding Deal Findability for a Middle-Market Investment Firm.

About the Client

Company AB is a middle-market investment firm. Today, the firm manages tens of billions of dollars in assets across offices in the U.S. and Europe. Company AB’s Private Equity Division relies on its accumulated deal knowledge — including diligence materials, transaction documents, and years of sourcing history — to evaluate new opportunities and support its existing portfolio.

Industry Context

Private equity firms increasingly manage deal, investor, and portfolio information across a patchwork of spreadsheets, disconnected CRMs, email inboxes, and shared drives. Industry surveys show that more than half of private market investors feel they waste meaningful time wrestling with data because of manual processes and outdated systems. That fragmentation carries a real cost: when a deal team’s institutional knowledge resides with a single dealmaker or in a system no one else can search, firms risk starting each new deal from a blank slate rather than building on their accumulated experience. Purpose-built deal CRMs like Dynamo Software address part of that problem for structured deal records, but their value is limited if they operate in isolation from the broader document repository where the qualitative, narrative side of a deal actually lives.

Current Situation

Company AB’s Private Equity Division stored its deal-related content in Microsoft SharePoint, but complex folder structures and inconsistent metadata tagging led to unsatisfactory search results for most users. Deal data itself resided in the firm’s Dynamo CRM, a separate platform, so achieving a comprehensive view of a deal required piecing together content from two disconnected systems. The Division asked Iknow to improve findability across both systems.

• Deal knowledge scattered across two disconnected systems. Documents lived in SharePoint and deal records lived in Dynamo CRM, with no unified way to search or view both together.
• Complex, inconsistent folder structures. Deal document navigation relied on folder hierarchies that varied widely in consistency.
• Inconsistent metadata tagging. Existing tagging practices weren’t standardized enough to enable reliable filtering or precise search results.
• A growing firm outpacing its knowledge infrastructure. As Company AB’s deal volume and team grew, ad hoc folder-based navigation and manual tagging could not keep pace with the Division’s information needs.

• Develop and populate a controlled taxonomy for the Private Equity Division’s deal-related content in SharePoint.
• Enable consistent, quality-controlled metadata tagging across the deal document libraries.
• Redesign the search experience using SharePoint Modern search web parts to deliver a more intuitive, integrated search and browsing experience.
• Integrate Dynamo CRM deal record data directly into the new SharePoint search environment to provide a comprehensive, unified view of deal-related knowledge.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement into two stages: taxonomy development and content tagging first, followed by redevelopment of the search experience itself using SharePoint Framework Modern search web parts, with deeper Dynamo CRM integration built out as the second stage progressed.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Term Store design. Iknow designed and populated a custom Term Store in SharePoint containing the Private Equity Division’s taxonomy, deriving new terms from existing document folder structures, Company AB’s Dynamo CRM classification schema, and direct user input.
• Controlled tagging infrastructure. Iknow configured SharePoint site columns and crawled property mappings for the new Term Store items, enabling controlled tagging of content across the deal document libraries.
• Pilot Deal Records list. Iknow built a pilot Deal Records list based on selected Dynamo CRM content, using the same site columns and managed properties as the document libraries, plus additional Dynamo-specific columns.
• Modern search web parts. Iknow deployed SharePoint Modern search web parts to enhance search capabilities, including filtering and sorting by Term Store values and other metadata.
• Search verticals and term-driven pages. Iknow developed search result verticals for rapid review of documents and deal records for any query, and created term-driven page templates that let the Division present search results for any taxonomy term on demand — useful for new hires getting up to speed on the firm’s experience in a specific industry or function.
• Deeper Dynamo integration. Iknow reviewed available Dynamo data fields, replicated them as SharePoint site columns in the custom Deals list, and built a scheduled PowerShell script to keep that data synchronized.
• Enhanced results templates. Iknow delivered enhanced search results templates that display Dynamo-based data in tabular and list formats, alongside a filterable, exportable main list for deal records.
• Technical documentation. Iknow authored a detailed Technical Guide covering the new SharePoint capabilities so the Division can independently add new data and features going forward.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor, working directly with Company AB’s Private Equity Division to integrate SharePoint document content with Dynamo CRM deal records into a single, coherent knowledge management environment.

Unifying Two Fundamentally Different Data Sources

Unstructured SharePoint documents and structured Dynamo CRM records use entirely different data models, and building two separate search experiences would have defeated the purpose of the project. Iknow addressed this by designing a single shared taxonomy, site columns, and managed properties that span both the document libraries and the new Deals list, enabling a single Term Store-powered filtering and search across both content types at once.

Keeping Deal Data Current Without a Manual Burden

A one-time data migration from Dynamo to SharePoint would have become stale the moment new deals were logged. Iknow addressed this by building a scheduled, PowerShell-based synchronization process that automatically keeps the SharePoint Deals list in sync with Dynamo, rather than relying on manual updates that the Division would need to maintain indefinitely.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Unified search experience: a single knowledge management search site that spans both SharePoint document libraries and Dynamo-sourced deal records.
• Search capability: multiple result verticals, granular, metadata-driven filtering and sorting, and several display formats — including lists, lists with previews, tables, and compressed tables — for different use cases.
• Automation: a scheduled PowerShell-based procedure to import and update deal record data from the Dynamo CRM without manual intervention.
• Enablement: a comprehensive Technical Guide delivered to the Division to support independent, ongoing extension of the platform.

Qualitative Outcomes

Company AB’s Private Equity Division gained a unified search experience that covers both deal documents and CRM-sourced deal records, closing the gap between unsatisfactory folder-based search and a genuinely comprehensive view of deal knowledge. Term-driven pages gave the Division a new, self-service way to onboard new hires quickly to the firm’s accumulated experience in a given industry or function — directly addressing a well-documented private equity knowledge management challenge, in which institutional knowledge tends to stay with individual dealmakers rather than becoming searchable by the whole firm. As of this writing, Iknow’s work with Company AB is ongoing, with further enhancements and additional external source integrations planned — reflecting a growing, trusted relationship rather than a one-time project.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the taxonomy foundation, tagging infrastructure, and the first-generation Modern search experience early in the engagement, then expanded the scope to deepen the Dynamo CRM integration, with the relationship continuing into subsequent phases of work.

Core Skills

• Taxonomy & metadata strategy
• SharePoint Modern search development
• CRM / system data integration
• Technical documentation & enablement

Methods & Frameworks

• Term Store design and controlled vocabulary development
• Site columns and managed property mapping
• Scheduled data synchronization
• User-centered search experience design

Technologies & Tools

• Microsoft SharePoint Online and SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Modern search web parts
• Dynamo Software CRM and PowerShell automation