What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is the web platform inside Microsoft 365 for storing, organising, and sharing files and pages across an organisation. It's the engine behind a surprising amount of what you use every day — Teams channel files, OneDrive personal storage, and most company intranets all run on SharePoint underneath.

What SharePoint provides

• Document libraries — file storage with versioning, co-authoring, metadata columns, and granular sharing.
• Lists — structured data tables that behave a bit like a lightweight database, with custom columns, views, and formatting.
• Pages and news — web pages built from drag-and-drop "web parts," used for intranet portals and announcements.
• Search — organisation-wide search across files, pages, and people.
• Permissions — fine-grained access at the site, library, folder, and item level, scoped to Entra ID users and groups.

The two site types

• Team sites are workspaces for a group of people working together — a department, project, or product. Every Microsoft 365 Group and every Microsoft Teams team is backed by a team site.
• Communication sites are designed for broadcasting information to a wider audience — intranet landing pages, HR portals, news hubs. They have fewer collaborative features and a more polished page layout.

SharePoint and the rest of Microsoft 365

• Teams: every channel's files live in a folder of the team's SharePoint site.
• OneDrive: each user's OneDrive is technically a personal SharePoint site, hidden behind a friendlier UI.
• Viva Connections: the modern intranet is a SharePoint communication site surfaced inside Teams.

SharePoint Online vs SharePoint Server

What you get with Microsoft 365 is SharePoint Online, the cloud-hosted service. SharePoint Server is the on-premises version, still sold but increasingly rare. They share concepts and APIs, but Microsoft is rapidly diverging the cloud product with features that never come back to Server.

If you're putting files anywhere shared in Microsoft 365 — even unknowingly — they're almost certainly sitting in SharePoint. Understanding it pays back the time many times over.