Look down your Microsoft 365 bill and count what your team actually opens. Outlook, Word, Excel, probably Teams. Sitting on that same licence, untouched in many owner-managed businesses, is SharePoint. And the thing it was built to replace, the shared drive or the ageing server in the cupboard, is often the messiest part of how the business holds what it knows.
What is SharePoint in simple terms?
SharePoint is Microsoft’s cloud tool for storing, organising and sharing a company’s documents, included in the business versions of Microsoft 365. It works through a web browser and replaces the traditional office file server. Instead of one sprawling shared drive, you create sites, one for each area of the business, each holding document libraries your team can reach from any device.
Two site types cover nearly everything. A team site is a working space where a group stores and edits files together. A communication site is a noticeboard, the place for policies, templates and company news. Access runs through three simple roles. Owners control the site, members add and edit content, and visitors can only read.
You’ll find it inside the Microsoft 365 portal at office.com, behind the grid icon in the corner, sitting alongside Outlook, Teams and OneDrive. Microsoft describes it as a secure place to store, organise, share and access information from any device, which is accurate if a little bland. The plainer description is a filing system for the whole business that lives online instead of in a cupboard.
Why does it matter for your business?
If you pay for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium, you already own SharePoint. The question is whether the money is doing anything. Used well, it gives client files, HR documents, policies and project material one structured home, with version history that shows who changed what and when, and permissions that decide who sees what.
The commercial evidence is decent, read with the right scepticism. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study of Microsoft 365 for businesses under 300 employees, commissioned by Microsoft, estimated a 163 per cent return over three years from adoption across the suite, SharePoint included. Commissioned research always flatters the sponsor, but the direction matches what shows up in practice. Less time hunting for the latest version of a file, fewer ten-megabyte attachments flying around, and external sharing that gives a client access to one folder rather than a copy of everything.
There’s a second reason it matters, and it’s less comfortable. Centralising your documents raises the stakes on getting the settings right. Microsoft encrypts the data and runs the servers, but the ICO’s cloud guidance is clear that the legal responsibility for personal data stays with you as the controller, whichever cloud service you use. The platform is Microsoft’s. The obligations are yours.
Where will you actually meet it?
You may be using SharePoint already without knowing it. Every file shared in a Microsoft Teams channel is stored in a SharePoint site behind the scenes. The links colleagues send that open documents in a browser, the shared folders that appear alongside your own OneDrive, the intranet page your IT provider keeps proposing, all of it is SharePoint wearing different clothes.
You’ll also meet it in sales conversations. IT providers pitch SharePoint rollouts as intranet projects, migration projects or modern workplace engagements, and the quotes vary wildly for what is often the same underlying work. A guest link is another common first contact. A client or subcontractor gives you access to one of their folders, or you give them access to one of yours, and nobody emails attachments again.
Increasingly you’ll meet it through AI. Microsoft 365 Copilot answers questions by reading the content your business holds in SharePoint and OneDrive, so whatever structure and permissions you have in place, good or bad, become the raw material for what the AI can see and say. A tidy SharePoint makes Copilot more useful. A careless one hands it things it should never surface.
When should you act, and when should you leave it alone?
Act if you have five or more staff, already pay for Microsoft 365, and share documents by email or a tangle of Dropbox folders and personal drives. That combination means you’re paying for the fix while living with the problem. Leave it alone if your team is tiny with simple needs, or the business runs happily on Google Workspace.
It’s also the wrong tool for some jobs. SharePoint stores documents; it won’t manage your sales pipeline or client workflows the way a proper CRM or practice-management system does. And search only works as well as the structure underneath it. Tip a decade of files into one library with no naming conventions and you’ll recreate the shared-drive mess at a monthly subscription price.
If you do go ahead, three settings deserve attention before any documents move. The NCSC recommends multi-factor authentication on every Microsoft 365 account and as few administrator accounts as you can manage. The third is the sharing default. Links set to open access, where anyone holding the link can read the file, are a common cause of accidental data exposure, and the consequences are real. The SEC fined US title insurer First American $487,616 after control failures around a document-sharing flaw left roughly 800 million records readable through a public link. If personal data leaks through a misconfigured link in your business, that’s a potential breach to be assessed and, where it meets the threshold, reported to the ICO within 72 hours.
Which related concepts are worth knowing?
Four names come up in the same breath as SharePoint. OneDrive is your personal work storage, for files that belong to you rather than the team. Teams is the chat front end that sits on top of SharePoint’s file storage. Power Automate turns SharePoint lists into simple workflows. And Copilot is the AI layer that reads whatever you’ve stored.
The OneDrive split trips people up more than any other. A useful rule of thumb is that if the business would still need the file after its author left, it belongs in SharePoint rather than OneDrive, because access follows the site, not the person. Power Automate earns its keep on small repeatable processes, holiday requests, document approvals, new starter checklists, each triggered from a SharePoint list. And retention labels, buried in the admin settings, let you set how long categories of records are kept, which lines up with the ICO’s expectation that businesses define retention schedules for the personal data they hold.
The Monday move is small. Check your plan includes SharePoint, and the business plans do. Sketch the five or six top-level areas the business actually runs on, perhaps operations, finance, HR, clients and projects. Ask whoever manages your IT to confirm MFA is on everywhere and open link sharing is off by default. Then pilot with one team and a handful of live folders before migrating anything wholesale. Microsoft’s own migration guidance points the same way, a small pilot first, structure agreed, then the rest.
