SharePoint vs Teams

As more and more companies embrace a modern workplace, moving their daily operations to the cloud, they will inevitably face two of the biggest collaboration tools – SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. But what’s the difference and which one should they be using?

SharePoint

SharePoint has been around for a very long time. It’s primarily used for storing documents and has awesome document management capabilities through version control, metadata (I’ll cover this in another blog), and integrations with other Microsoft 365 apps such as Power Automate and PowerApps. It’s also highly customisable and is great for intranets with its news and events web parts, site pages and useful links.

Microsoft continues to invest in SharePoint features and functionality, so it’s definitely not going anywhere any time soon! However, collaboration in the modern workplace requires real-time communication. SharePoint has tried to enable this through webparts such as discussion boards and announcements, but it is still lacking in the social and communication department.

That’s where Microsoft Teams comes in…

Teams

Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that combines chat, calls, meetings, planning and file sharing.

It reduces the need for emails and attachments by utilising chat, file sharing and real-time collaboration all in one place.

Here’s where it gets confusing…

When a new “Team” is created in Microsoft Teams, an associated SharePoint team site is also automatically created. This acts as the “back end” for the Team and is where all files created or uploaded in the Team are stored, which means that the “File” tab in a Team channel essentially functions as a window to SharePoint. 

So this means in the back-end, you also get all the advantages that SharePoint offers in its highly efficient document management capabilities!

So does SharePoint still have a place?

Absolutely!

Deciding whether to use SharePoint or Teams completely depends on your needs. Not all communication should happen in Teams and not all files should be stored on a SharePoint intranet.

A Team in Microsoft Teams is only accessible by members who have been added to the Team, whereas SharePoint is open by default. This means that for company announcements or important documents such as policies and procedures, SharePoint would still be the better choice.

However, for teams and projects where there is a lot of daily collaboration, Microsoft Teams would enable you to be productive without switching between applications. In these cases, Teams users may not even be aware that there is a SharePoint site behind the files tab.

So, as you can see, there’s no competition between the two, and when you use them together, you get the best of both worlds!

Additionally, as an advanced feature, you can add SharePoint sites as “tabs” to your Teams channels. This, again, saves time and increases productivity as employees can access the SharePoint “intranet” alongside Microsoft Teams’ collaboration tools all in one place.

At the time of writing this blog, Teams also has a “preview” solution that enables you to embed a SharePoint site as an app on the left navigation in Microsoft Teams. As Microsoft continue to invest in Teams, we may see an even closer relationship between the two apps, increasingly reducing the need for end-users to jump between the two in their working day.