SharePoint or simple document management: what do you need?

SharePoint is a powerful platform. You can build intranets with it, lists, forms and entire workflows. Yet most small and mid-sized companies use only a small part of it. Before you set up a new environment or rebuild an existing one, it is worth taking an honest look at what you actually do with it.

What SharePoint is used for in practice

For most companies it comes down to three things:

• Shared documents with permissions. Finance sees different folders than sales.
• Versions. Someone overwrites a file and you want to go back to yesterday.
• Sometimes retention. The accounts have to stay available for years and must not disappear by accident.

At its core, that is a shared folder with rules. Nothing wrong with that, but it is something different from what SharePoint was designed for.

What you pay in complexity

SharePoint works with sites, document libraries, content types, columns, and permissions per site, per library, per folder and even per item. That gives you a lot of options, but also a lot to manage. After a few years, nobody quite knows who can access what, because somewhere an exception was made on a single folder.

That is why SharePoint has created a field of its own: governance, migration projects and consultants who design structures. For an organisation with hundreds of staff and an intranet, that is a reasonable investment. For a company of twenty people that mainly wants to share quotes, contracts and the accounts, it is often more than needed.

A short self-test

Answer these questions for your own company:

1. Do you need an intranet, with news pages, a staff directory and a home page for everyone?
2. Do you work with lists and forms, for example for leave requests or a ticket register?
3. Do you run automated workflows, such as Power Automate flows that route approvals?
4. Do several people edit the same Word document at the same time in the desktop app?
5. Or is it mainly about shared folders, with agreements on who may do what and how long things are kept?

If you answer yes to 1 to 4, SharePoint is probably the right choice. If you mostly end up at question 5, you need document management, not a platform.

The features that really matter

If you are looking for document management, these are the points to check:

• Permissions per group. Read or write per team, rather than exceptions on individual folders.
• Version history. Restore earlier versions without calling the administrator.
• Retention periods and legal hold. Files that cannot be permanently deleted before the period ends, and a way to freeze everything in a dispute. More on this in the retention obligation for your accounts.
• Activity per file. Who created, changed, moved or shared it.
• Guests from outside. An accountant or lawyer who can access one folder for a limited period.
• Mail filed with the case. Saving an important email next to the documents it concerns.
• Check-out. Locking a file while you work on it.
• Metadata. Fields such as client, case number or status.
• Approvals. A document only becomes final after a second person signs off.

Not every company needs all of them. Write down what is essential for you, and only then compare products.

What SharePoint does well

Keep the comparison fair. SharePoint is strong at intranets, at lists and at the link with Power Automate. Editing Office documents together in the desktop apps also works well. If your company relies on those, switching is a big step that deserves careful thought.

Where Binadit Drive fits in

Binadit Drive has team folders with read or write permissions per person or per group, versions and a trash. You can turn on document management per team folder. That gives you retention periods of 1 to 30 years, legal hold on a folder, a file or a whole team folder with a reason, a signed retention report your accountant can verify, activity per file, and guests from outside who sign in with a code sent by email, for one team folder and with an end date. From the webmail you can save an email as .eml with the case.

What is not there yet: check-out, version numbers with comments, metadata fields and approvals. These are being built. If you need them today, that is a reason to wait or to keep SharePoint.

The SharePoint alternative page explains what a switch looks like, and the Drive page lists all features. To compare other parts as well, see the European alternatives.