Microsoft SharePoint Intranets & Document Management

What is Microsoft SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint is a web-based platform for storing, organising and sharing information, and it is included with most Microsoft 365 plans. Organisations typically use it for three overlapping jobs: managing documents, running an intranet, and giving teams a shared place to work. It is one of the most widely deployed business platforms in the world, which is both its strength and the reason so many deployments drift — SharePoint will let you build almost anything, including a mess.

The two kinds of SharePoint site

Almost everything in SharePoint Online is built from two site types. Communication sites are designed for publishing to a wide audience — company news, policies, an intranet home page, an HR or safety hub. A small number of people author, everyone else reads. Team sites are for a group doing work together, and each one is connected to a Microsoft 365 Group, so it comes with shared membership and can be surfaced directly in Microsoft Teams. Getting this choice right at the start saves a great deal of restructuring later.

What SharePoint actually does

Document management. Files live in document libraries with version history, co-authoring, metadata and retention settings. Two people can edit the same document at once, you can see and roll back to earlier versions, and you can classify content with columns rather than burying it in folder trees.

Intranet and internal communications. Modern pages and news posts let you publish properly formatted content without a developer, and hub sites tie related sites together with shared navigation and branding.

Lists and lightweight process. SharePoint lists hold structured information — registers, requests, trackers — and become genuinely useful when combined with Power Apps for the interface and Power Automate for approvals and notifications.

Search. Search spans files, sites and people across your tenant, and respects permissions, so people only ever see results they are allowed to open. Search quality is largely a reflection of how well your content is structured — it rewards good information architecture and punishes neglect.

SharePoint Online vs SharePoint Server

SharePoint Online is hosted by Microsoft as part of Microsoft 365. You get new capability continuously without managing servers or patching, and it connects natively to the rest of the Microsoft 365 stack. This is where nearly all new work happens.

SharePoint Server runs on infrastructure you control, and some organisations still have good reasons for it — specific regulatory constraints, deep customisation, or systems that cannot reach the cloud. Hybrid arrangements are possible, and Microsoft continues to ship a subscription version for on-premises use. If you are weighing a move, our migration service covers the practical side: what moves cleanly, what needs rebuilding, and what should be left behind.

How SharePoint fits with Teams, OneDrive and Copilot

These tools overlap by design, and confusion about which to use is one of the most common causes of digital mess. OneDrive is for your own work in progress; SharePoint is for anything that belongs to a team or the organisation — we cover the distinction in detail in SharePoint vs OneDrive. Microsoft Teams is the conversation layer, and every team is quietly backed by a SharePoint site holding its files. Viva Connections takes your SharePoint intranet and surfaces it inside Teams, including on mobile for staff who never sit at a desk.

Microsoft 365 Copilot changes the stakes. Copilot answers questions using the content a person already has access to, which means the quality of its answers depends directly on how well organised and correctly permissioned your SharePoint content is. Tidy, well-structured content makes Copilot genuinely useful; sprawl and over-sharing make it confidently wrong. We walk through the groundwork in preparing SharePoint for Copilot.

Where SharePoint projects usually go wrong

The technology is rarely the hard part. Deployments struggle when there is no agreed information architecture, when permissions have been granted ad hoc until nobody can explain who can see what, when content is migrated wholesale without deciding what still matters, and when the intranet launches without anyone owning it afterwards. Those are governance and design problems, not licensing problems.

That is the work we do: designing the structure, making it look like somewhere people want to spend time, and handing it over with the governance to keep it healthy. Browse the SharePoint Look Book for examples, or talk to a SharePoint consultant about your environment.