☕ SharePoint Tip #1 — What is SharePoint Online and why does it matter?
Good morning! Here is your 15-minute SharePoint tip for today.
Day 1 | Week 1 — Platform Foundations
What is SharePoint Online?
SharePoint Online is Microsoft’s cloud-based platform for storing, organising, sharing, and collaborating on content across your organisation. Unlike a traditional file server that lives on physical hardware in your office, SharePoint lives in Microsoft’s cloud — meaning files are accessible from any device, anywhere in the world, with no VPN needed.
Think of it as having three personalities in one platform:
- File server — store and manage documents (what your company primarily uses it for)
- Intranet — publish news, pages, and announcements to the whole organisation
- Application platform — build lists, forms, and workflows without writing code
How it fits in Microsoft 365
SharePoint Online is the content backbone of the entire Microsoft 365 suite. Almost every service touches it:
- Microsoft Teams — every Teams channel stores its files in a SharePoint document library behind the scenes
- OneDrive for Business — is actually a personal SharePoint library assigned to each user
- Power Automate — reads from and writes to SharePoint lists and libraries to automate workflows
- Power Apps — uses SharePoint lists as a data source for custom business applications
This means when you improve SharePoint, you improve the entire M365 experience for your users.
The 5 core building blocks
You’ll hear these terms every day — memorise them:
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Tenant | Your entire organisation’s Microsoft 365 environment |
| Site collection | A container grouping related sites (e.g. HR, Finance) |
| Site | A website where the actual work happens (team site or communication site) |
| Library | Where files are stored — the replacement for a file server share |
| List | Structured data in rows and columns — like a simple database |
Try it today (5 minutes)
Open your company’s SharePoint in a browser. Look at the URL — it will look something like:
https://yourcompany.sharepoint.com/sites/HR
The /sites/HR part tells you which site you’re on. Click into any document library and notice it looks like a folder on a file server — but with extra columns like Modified, Modified By, and sharing options.
As a Product Owner
Your users will constantly compare SharePoint to "how it worked on the file server." Your job is to help them see that SharePoint isn’t just a file server in the cloud — it’s a platform that makes their work faster, safer, and more collaborative. The key selling points to internalise: accessible anywhere, version history, real-time co-authoring, and full-text search.
See you tomorrow at 6:00 AM with Tip #2 — Document Libraries in depth!
This is part of your 30-day SharePoint Online learning journey.