OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams: where to store company documents

“Which Teams was that in, again?” — time lost hunting for files, conflicting versions and documents that vanish when an employee leaves are real costs. The cause is almost always the same: no clear rule about what goes where. Yet Microsoft’s logic is simple once understood.

OneDrive is the employee’s personal drawer (work in progress, not yet shared); SharePoint is the company filing cabinet (documents that belong to the organization and must outlive it); Teams is the collaboration front door, whose files are actually stored in SharePoint.

A structure by department or major project suits most small businesses: a few well-named libraries, consistent access rights and predictable file names. Avoid two extremes: a single catch-all where everyone writes everywhere, and a tree so deep nobody follows it. Microsoft 365 metadata and search do the rest.

Plan the lifecycle: who owns each library, what happens when an employee leaves (their OneDrive can be transferred to a manager for a limited period) and what gets archived or deleted. These rules also support your retention and destruction duties under Law 25.

Migrating from a file server or local drives is the right moment to sort: you do not move ten years of “just in case” archives. SolutionsCW plans the structure, migrates in batches, verifies permissions and trains the team on the new habits — because the best filing system fails if nobody understands the rule.