How to Use SharePoint Properly: A Non-Technical Guide for Kent Businesses

If any of that sounds familiar, you are not alone. SharePoint is genuinely powerful, but it is also poorly explained and rarely set up in a way that works well for small and medium sized businesses from the start.

This guide explains what SharePoint is actually for, how to think about it, and how to use it in a way that makes your team's working life easier rather than harder.

What is SharePoint, in plain English?

SharePoint is Microsoft's shared file storage and collaboration platform. Think of it as the shared drive for your whole organisation, the place where documents that belong to the business, rather than to an individual, should live.

It is already included with most Microsoft 365 plans. Every time you create a Team in Microsoft Teams, a SharePoint site is automatically created behind it to store that Team's files. When someone shares a document through Teams, it is actually stored in SharePoint. Most people use SharePoint without realising it.

The important distinction to understand is the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive. OneDrive is your personal cloud storage: documents you are working on individually, files that belong to you. SharePoint is for shared, organisational content: files that belong to a team, a department, or the business as a whole. Keeping these two things properly separated is the foundation of a well-organised M365 environment.

How SharePoint is structured

SharePoint organises content into three layers, and understanding these makes everything else easier to follow.

Sites A Site is a workspace for a team, department, or project. You might have a site for your whole company, a site for each department, or a site for a specific large project. Sites have their own pages, file libraries, and permissions.

Document libraries Inside each site you have document libraries, essentially folders that hold files. A library is not just storage though; each library can have its own permissions, its own version history settings, and its own metadata columns that help with search and organisation.

Files The actual documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and other files your team works with day to day. Files in SharePoint can be edited directly in your browser, co-authored in real time with colleagues, and accessed from any device.

Version history: one of SharePoint's most underused features

Every time a file is saved in SharePoint, a version is automatically created. This means you can go back to any previous version of a document (from yesterday, last week, or six months ago) without any manual effort.

For businesses that have experienced the pain of someone overwriting important work, or a document being changed by mistake with no way to recover the original, version history is a revelation. It is on by default and costs nothing extra. Most businesses simply do not know it is there.

To access it, right-click any file in SharePoint, select Version history, and you will see a full list of every previous version with timestamps and the name of whoever made each change.

Permissions: who can see and do what

SharePoint allows you to control access at the site level, the library level, and even the individual file level. This matters because not everyone in your business should have access to everything: HR documents, financial records, board-level materials, and client-specific information all benefit from being restricted to the people who actually need them.

The most common mistake with permissions is either giving everyone access to everything for simplicity, or setting up such a complex permission structure that nobody can find anything without asking for help.

A practical approach for most SMEs is to set permissions at the site level: each department or team has its own site, and access to that site is managed as a group. Within a site, the default access applies to everything unless you have a specific reason to restrict further. This is simple enough to maintain without an IT degree but provides meaningful separation between different areas of the business.

Search: better than you think

SharePoint has a powerful search function that searches not just file names but the content inside documents. If you can remember a phrase or a few keywords from a document but cannot remember what it was called or where it was saved, searching for those words will surface it.

This only works if content is actually stored in SharePoint rather than scattered across email attachments, desktop folders, and personal OneDrives. One of the most impactful things you can do for your team's productivity is to establish a clear policy that shared business documents live in SharePoint, and then stick to it.

How SharePoint connects with Teams

If your business uses Microsoft Teams, you are already using SharePoint behind the scenes. Every channel in a Team has a corresponding folder in a SharePoint document library. Files shared in a Teams channel are stored in SharePoint, which means they are versioned, searchable, and accessible outside of Teams as well.

Understanding this connection helps avoid the confusion that arises when staff are not sure whether to save something to SharePoint or share it in Teams. The answer is effectively the same thing. What matters is which Team or channel it belongs to and whether the right people have access to it.

Common mistakes to avoid

Saving everything to OneDrive instead of SharePoint Shared business documents should be in SharePoint. When they end up in a personal OneDrive, they become invisible to the rest of the team and create retrieval problems when that person is on leave or leaves the business.

No consistent naming or folder structure SharePoint does not automatically organise your content: that requires a conscious decision about how files should be named and where they should go. A simple, agreed naming convention and folder structure, established at the start, saves enormous time later.

Sharing with anonymous links When sharing files externally, it is tempting to use the quickest option, an anonymous link that anyone can access. This creates a data exposure risk. Sharing should require recipients to sign in, and links should ideally have an expiry date, particularly for sensitive documents.

Not using it consistently SharePoint only delivers its benefits when the team actually uses it. If half your staff save to SharePoint and the other half email attachments or save to their desktop, you end up with fragmented information and no single source of truth. Getting everyone on the same page, with clear guidance and a bit of initial hand-holding, is the most important part of making SharePoint work.

Want help getting SharePoint working properly for your team?

CT1 Technologies helps businesses across Canterbury and Kent set up, structure, and migrate to SharePoint, including permissions, folder structures, Teams integration, and staff guidance so that people actually use it correctly from day one.

If your file storage is currently a mess of shared drives, email attachments, and personal OneDrives, we can help you bring it together into something that actually works. Get in touch and tell us what you're working with.

CT1 Technologies provides managed IT support, cybersecurity, and cloud services to businesses across Canterbury and Kent.