SharePoint

SharePoint is the web platform inside Microsoft 365 for storing, organising, and sharing files and pages across an organisation. It provides team sites (workspaces for groups, departments, or projects), document libraries with versioning and co-authoring, and communication sites used for intranets and company news.

SharePoint sits underneath a lot of the platform without you noticing: every Microsoft Teams channel stores its files in a SharePoint document library, and OneDrive is technically a personal SharePoint site. When people talk about "putting it on SharePoint," they usually mean uploading to a team site library rather than to a personal OneDrive folder.

Worked example

An HR team builds a communication site as the department's intranet page, publishing policy updates as news posts that show up in the SharePoint start page and the Teams app for anyone in the organisation. Separately, they use a team site's document library to hold the actual policy documents, with metadata columns for "status" (draft/approved/retired) and views filtered by department, so the library works like a lightweight database rather than a flat folder of files. A retention label applied at the library level keeps approved policies for the required period even if someone tries to delete them early.

Common pitfalls

Recreating a deep, mirrored folder structure from an old on-prem file server is the most common early mistake — SharePoint's metadata columns and filtered views usually replace what nested folders were doing, and a shallow structure with good metadata is both easier to secure and easier to search than ten levels of folders. Sharing a document by emailing the file itself rather than a SharePoint link defeats co-authoring and version history, and quietly creates an uncontrolled copy outside the site's permissions and any retention policy applied to it. And assuming every team site should be broadly readable "just in case" is a real governance risk — SharePoint permissions default to the site's membership, and loosening that without a specific reason is how sensitive content ends up visible to people who never needed it.