SharePoint is rarely bad on the day it is set up. It becomes bad gradually, through a series of reasonable decisions made by people who were busy — and by the time anyone notices, the fix is a migration rather than a tidy-up.
What follows is less a feature tour than a list of the decisions that actually determine whether people find their documents or give up and email them to each other.
Structure: flatter than feels natural
The instinct when moving from a file server is to recreate the folder tree. It is the wrong instinct, because it recreates the problem that made the file server unusable.
SharePoint is designed around separate sites for separate purposes, with broad, shallow libraries inside them and metadata — columns for client, document type, year, status — doing the work that nested folders used to do. The practical benefit is that one document can appear in several views without being duplicated, and search actually returns it.
A workable rule: if you are more than three or four levels deep, the structure has stopped helping. Flatten it and add a column instead.
Permissions: the part that quietly goes wrong
This is where most SharePoint estates fail, and it fails invisibly.
Permissions should be granted to groups, at site level, and inheritance should be left alone. Every time someone breaks inheritance to share a single folder with a single person, the estate becomes slightly harder to reason about. Do that for three years and nobody can answer the question “who can see this?” without an audit.
Two settings are worth checking today. First, whether your default sharing link is set to anyone in the organisation — it frequently is, and it means well-meaning people hand out organisation-wide access without realising. Second, whether guest sharing is on, and if so whether anyone reviews who the guests are.
Is your SharePoint heading for trouble?
Tick anything that is true of your setup today. In this one, ticks are not good news.
Why this matters more now than it did
Permission sprawl used to be a theoretical risk. Very few people browse a document library looking for things they should not see.
Copilot changes that. It surfaces content based on what a user is technically permitted to access, which means anything over-shared becomes discoverable by asking a plain question. Businesses that turn Copilot on without reviewing permissions first tend to find out within a fortnight — usually because someone asks an innocent question and receives the salary review in reply.
If Copilot is on your roadmap, treat a permissions review as part of the work rather than as a follow-up.
Versioning and retention
Version history is on by default and is one of the genuinely excellent features. It is worth telling people it exists, because a surprising number still keep Proposal_v7_FINAL_v2.docx out of habit.
Retention is the other half. Keeping everything forever feels safe and is not: it enlarges your exposure under data protection law, degrades search, and defers a decision somebody eventually has to make under worse conditions. Agree how long each kind of document should live, apply a policy, and let it run.
Sync, used properly
OneDrive sync causes more support tickets than the rest of SharePoint combined, almost always for the same reason: someone has synced an entire library rather than using Files On-Demand or working in the browser.
Sync the things you genuinely need offline. Leave the rest online. It prevents full disks, conflict copies, and the particular misery of two people editing different local versions of the same spreadsheet.
Automation, once the basics hold
Power Automate and Power Apps are worth reaching for — approval routing, notifications, replacing a form that currently exists as an email to a shared mailbox. But automation built on top of a chaotic structure simply automates the chaos. Get the architecture and permissions right first; the rest is quick afterwards.
Where to start
If you only do two things: check what your default sharing link does, and find out how many SharePoint sites exist and who owns them. Those two answers usually tell you everything about how the next twelve months are going to go.
If the answers are uncomfortable, it is a well-trodden problem and not an expensive one to put right at this stage. We are happy to take a look.
