SharePoint Online

What SharePoint Online means in practice

Almost every organisation on Microsoft 365 uses SharePoint whether they know it or not. Every Team has a SharePoint site behind it; every file shared in a Teams channel lives in a document library. Treating SharePoint as an optional intranet product rather than the file layer of the platform is how information architecture problems begin.

The building blocks are sites, libraries, lists and permissions. Communication sites publish content to a broad audience. Team sites support collaboration and are connected to a Microsoft 365 group. Hub sites associate related sites for navigation and search. Libraries hold documents with version history, co-authoring, check-out and metadata columns. Lists hold structured data and increasingly serve as lightweight applications with Power Apps and Power Automate.

Migration from on-premises file servers is the project most organisations undertake, and the mistake most of them make is lifting the existing folder structure verbatim. Fifteen years of nested folders, path length problems, duplicate documents and permissions granted to individuals rather than groups do not improve by moving to the cloud. A migration is the one realistic opportunity to redesign around how teams actually work, apply metadata where it earns its keep, and retire content that should have been archived years ago.

Governance is the ongoing discipline: naming conventions, site provisioning process, external sharing defaults, guest access review, retention labels aligned to record-keeping obligations, and periodic permission review. Copilot has raised the stakes here, because loose permissions that were harmless when nobody could find a file are exposed the moment natural-language retrieval is switched on.

Storage is pooled at the tenant level — a base allocation plus an amount per licensed user — and additional storage is purchasable. Organisations migrating large file shares should check the entitlement before assuming the target has room.