SharePoint without structure: Don’t damage your business

Business leaders like you roll out SharePoint to make their employees’ jobs easier, not harder. More than 200,000 organisations use this powerful collaboration and content management platform for good reason: it increases efficiency, improves communication, supports remote working, offers scalability, and secures information – but don’t take these benefits for granted.

Without proper structure, SharePoint’s value will be undermined, and you’ll be responsible for it causing more harm to operational efficiency than good – reflecting a lack of commitment to your employees and exposing your business to its limitations.

The hidden costs of SharePoint neglect

If you neglect SharePoint by failing to implement proper structure, configuration and management, you’ll let your employees down. Rather than enhancing their performance, it will quickly become chaotic, insecure, and inefficient.

Too much clutter

SharePoint without structure is like a library with no shelves – everything’s there, but no one can find what they need. What starts as a powerful tool for organising teams, documents, sites, and libraries quickly spirals into a digital dumping ground – ungoverned, unsearchable, and unscalable.

Without structure, governance and control, you’re not supporting collaboration and productivity, you’re burying them under a mountain of clutter.

• An uncontrolled build-up of documents and files
• The creation of too many sites, document libraries, or folders that become redundant or overlap
• Employees save files in multiple locations or make unnecessary copies, leaving them scattered across the platform

Amid this chaos, critical information gets buried, teams waste time hunting for the latest version, and decisions get delayed. And as your business grows, the chaos multiplies. More people, more projects, more data congesting an already unmanageable system.

Access confusion

If you treat access control as an afterthought, SharePoint becomes a data security risk amid inconsistent permissions. Granting users too much access or not enough leads to confusion over who can do what. The result? An opaque SharePoint environment that invites challenges that should have been avoided – from collaboration bottlenecks amid version control confusion to data breaches following sensitive information exposure.

Poor search experience

When teams are free to dump content into SharePoint without structure, the efficiency of its search experience is disrupted. Critical information becomes lost amid inconsistent naming, unstructured metadata, and file sprawl. Your employees waste time hunting for information that should be instantly accessible – if they can find it at all. Every missing file, every irrelevant search result, hinders collaboration and productivity – and erodes trust in SharePoint.

Exceeding storage capacity

This symptom of too much clutter isn’t just an inconvenience – it’s a business risk. When you hit your limit, employees won’t be able to upload new files, create new sites, or add new content, eroding their efficiency – causing their efficiency and productivity to stall.

This reactive strategy will leave you scrambling to delete unnecessary files and compress large ones – but it’s only a quick fix, not a solution. And when that doesn’t work, you’ll have to pay for extra storage. This unwanted scenario is amplified as your business grows and your data grows with it, forcing you to purchase additional storage ad hoc to keep up, causing costs to spiral.