For years, SharePoint has carried a reputation for complicated document libraries, outdated intranets, confusing navigation, too many sites, and information that employees simply cannot find. But Microsoft 365 is changing, and Copilot is making SharePoint more important than it has been in a long time.In this episode of the M365 FM Podcast, Mirko Peters talks with Microsoft MVP Marcin Siewnicki about how SharePoint is evolving from a traditional document and intranet platform into a central information and knowledge layer for the modern workplace. Marcin has worked with SharePoint since the SharePoint 2003 era, giving him more than two decades of perspective on how the platform has changed. WHY SHAREPOINT GOT A BAD REPUTATION Much of SharePoint’s reputation was created by the way organizations implemented it. Intranets were often designed by IT, heavily customized, difficult to use, and disconnected from what employees actually needed.Instead of continuously gathering feedback and improving the experience, many companies delivered an intranet and expected employees to adapt to it. The result was complex navigation, outdated content, overloaded pages, and systems people avoided whenever possible. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE BEFORE TECHNOLOGY One of the biggest problems is not SharePoint itself but how information is organized inside it. Without a clear information architecture, SharePoint can quickly become a huge shared folder filled with duplicated files, outdated information, unclear ownership, and multiple versions of the same document.Marcin explains why organizations should start with a simple structure, understand their data, remove unnecessary content, and introduce basic metadata. Information architecture does not have to be complicated to make SharePoint significantly easier to use. BUILDING A MODERN SHAREPOINT WORKPLACE A modern SharePoint homepage should not become an endless collection of web parts, corporate announcements, applications, and links. It should be simple, personalized, visually clear, and focused on what employees actually need.Communication sites can provide departments and organizations with modern, mobile-friendly publishing experiences without requiring the enormous custom intranet projects that were common in the past. The focus should be on useful information, important applications, relevant documents, straightforward navigation, and strong search capabilities. SOLVING THE SHAREPOINT NAVIGATION PROBLEM Navigation remains one of SharePoint’s biggest challenges. Organizations frequently attempt to expose every department, application, resource, and internal page through a single navigation structure.Marcin explains why simpler navigation usually works better. Global navigation should focus on the most important destinations, while detailed navigation can be provided closer to individual departments, sites, and business areas. Otherwise, navigation itself becomes another information problem. SHAREPOINT AND TEAMS SPRAWL Microsoft Teams and SharePoint are deeply connected. Every new Team and many Teams channels can introduce additional SharePoint resources, which means uncontrolled Teams creation can quickly become uncontrolled SharePoint growth.Organizations therefore need simple creation processes, templates, basic metadata, lifecycle management, and user education. Employees should understand when they need a Team, when a SharePoint site is sufficient, and what happens behind the scenes when these collaboration environments are created.One useful way of looking at the relationship is to think of Microsoft Teams as the collaboration interface while SharePoint provides much of the document and information layer underneath it. GOVERNANCE WITHOUT KILLING INNOVATION Governance does not need to mean preventing employees from using new technology. The goal is to provide enough freedom for people to work effectively while maintaining control over information, permissions, external sharing, security, and lifecycle management.Marcin discusses periodically reviewing inactive SharePoint sites and Teams, identifying environments that are no longer needed, checking ownership, reviewing permissions, and archiving or removing obsolete workspaces.Governance also cannot remain exclusively an IT exercise. Business stakeholders and users need to be involved because overly complicated policies often lead employees to find their own workarounds. PERMISSIONS, SHARING AND SECURITY Permissions become increasingly difficult to understand as SharePoint environments grow. Users add colleagues, external partners, vendors, and sharing links over time, but access is rarely reviewed with the same frequency.Regular permission reviews should therefore become part of the governance model. Site and Team owners need responsibility for checking who still requires access and whether external sharing remains necessary.Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels can add another security layer by helping organizations classify and protect information based on its sensitivity. AUTOMATING SHAREPOINT GOVERNANCE Governance does not have to be completely manual. PowerShell, Microsoft Graph, Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps, and specialized third-party platforms can automate many administrative and governance processes.Marcin sees PowerShell and Microsoft Graph as fundamental tools for administrators, while Power Automate can provide practical automation for provisioning, approvals, notifications, lifecycle processes, and many other SharePoint scenarios. MODERN DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SharePoint is still heavily associated with documents, and documents remain an important part of the platform. The challenge is managing them properly.Metadata, naming conventions, permissions, versioning, storage management, and sensitivity labels all contribute to a healthier information environment. Versioning deserves particular attention because large documents with many retained versions can consume significant amounts of SharePoint storage. METADATA VS. FOLDERS The old SharePoint debate between folders and metadata has not completely disappeared. Marcin argues that metadata remains extremely valuable, but organizations need to keep their metadata models simple.If users need to spend too much time deciding how to classify every document, adoption will suffer. Metadata should support the way employees work rather than creating another administrative task. COPILOT CAN AUTOMATE METADATA Copilot changes this equation because AI can reduce the manual work associated with metadata. SharePoint can analyze documents, extract relevant information, and populate columns based on the content.Organizations still need to decide which metadata is useful, but employees no longer necessarily have to enter everything manually. This can make structured information much more practical at scale. COPILOT CHANGES SHAREPOINT Copilot significantly lowers the amount of SharePoint knowledge employees need before they can start accomplishing useful work.Users can increasingly create content, work with documents, extract information, generate pages, and interact with organizational knowledge using natural language instead of understanding every technical SharePoint concept.Many of the repetitive tasks traditionally associated with maintaining SharePoint environments can therefore become easier. FROM FINDING DOCUMENTS TO GETTING ANSWERS This may be the biggest change of all.Traditional SharePoint experiences required employees to find the right site, navigate to the right library, locate the correct document, open it, and search for the information they needed.Copilot changes that interaction. Instead of only finding documents, employees can increasingly ask questions and receive answers based on information stored across their Microsoft 365 environment.SharePoint therefore starts moving from document storage toward becoming an enterprise knowledge layer. COPILOT CAN UNDERSTAND MORE THAN OFFICE DOCUMENTS Organizational knowledge is not limited to Word documents, Excel files, and PowerPoint presentations.Copilot can work with different types of information, including text, HTML, Markdown, SharePoint lists, and content extracted from video transcripts.That means training videos, recorded meetings, presentations, and other media stored within the Microsoft 365 environment can become part of the knowledge available through AI. WHAT HAPPENED TO SHAREPOINT AGENTS? SharePoint Agents provide dedicated AI experiences grounded in selected SharePoint sites, document libraries, or information sources.Marcin discusses where these agents fit into the current Copilot landscape and why the concept has become less prominent as Copilot itself gains broader capabilities for interacting directly with SharePoint information. IS SHAREPOINT REALLY COPILOT’S KNOWLEDGE LAYER? There is certainly marketing around the idea, but there is also a strong technical reality behind it.Organizations already store enormous amounts of business information in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. Copilot can use this information, which means the quality of the underlying environment directly affects the quality of the AI experience.Poor permissions, outdated documents, duplicated information, weak metadata, and uncontrolled SharePoint sprawl do not disappear because Copilot has been introduced. They potentially become even more important Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/m365-fm-modern-work-security-and-productivity-with-microsoft-365--6704921/support.
