SharePoint, Teams or OneDrive: Where Should Your Files Actually Live?

The one rule: if the business would need it after you left, it lives in SharePoint. OneDrive is for you; SharePoint is for us. Teams is a way of getting to SharePoint, not an alternative to it.

The most common failure is the opposite: a business's real files scattered across personal OneDrives because that is where "Save" defaulted, shared out by link, and lost or orphaned every time someone leaves.

Design sites around who needs access, not around the org chart or the old server's folders. Fewer, broader sites with clean permissions beat dozens of tiny ones.

A structure that works for most 10 to 100-person businesses:

• Company (everyone): policies, templates, brand, handbook, the stuff everyone reads and few edit.
• Clients or Projects (most staff): one library or folder per client, consistently named, because this is what people search for most.
• Finance (finance and directors only): its own site so its permissions are simple and visible.
• HR (HR and directors only): same reasoning.
• Leadership (directors): board papers and anything else that must not leak.
• Team sites as needed: sales, operations, marketing, each a Team with its own Files.

Naming: a short written convention (for example Client-Year-Document) and folder depth of no more than three levels. Deep folder trees are where files go to die; search and metadata are what SharePoint is good at.

1. Default sharing link = specific people, not "anyone with the link". Set at tenant level.
2. External sharing allowed only on the sites that need it (Clients, perhaps), off elsewhere, with guest access reviewed.
3. Never share by adding "Everyone" to a site. It is the setting Copilot rollouts trip over most.
4. Permissions at site level, not folder level. Folder-level permissions are invisible, accumulate, and break. If a folder needs different permissions, it probably needs its own site.
5. Sensitivity labels (Business Premium) on Finance, HR and Leadership so confidential documents stay confidential wherever they are sent.

Then the two habits: share the link to the document, not an attachment, so there is one version; and check permissions when a project ends or a client leaves.

Every site has a named owner who is not IT: the person who decides who gets in and what the structure is. IT enforces; the owner decides. Without that, sites drift into "everyone has access to everything because nobody wanted to say no".

Quarterly: owners review membership, IT runs the sharing reports (SharePoint Advanced Management, included once a Copilot licence exists, makes this easy), stale sites are archived, and anything business-critical found in a personal OneDrive is moved.

The server in the cupboard is the reason Copilot, backup and remote working all half-work. Moving it is a project, and a well-understood one:

1. Design the structure above before touching a file. Do not replicate the server's folder tree.
2. Clean as you go: archive what nobody has opened in two years, delete duplicates.
3. Migrate with Microsoft's tools or ours, in stages, with the owners checking each site.
4. Redirect: map network drives to SharePoint for the transition, then remove them.
5. Switch off the server, and its backup, only when nobody has needed it for a month.

For a typical small business it is a few weeks, most of it deciding rather than copying.

We design the structure with you, set the tenant-level sharing and label settings, migrate from servers and personal drives, and run the quarterly review as part of managed support. It is also the first half of any Copilot readiness work, and it is what makes the backup and security checklist items about SharePoint answerable.