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SharePoint

SharePoint helps people organize, manage, and publish information for its intended audience. Sites, pages, lists, libraries, and permissions give that information a clear home and owner. The audience can be a working Team, a department, or the whole organization.

Best For​

Use SharePoint for intranet content, document libraries, published information, structured lists, team sites, and organization resources. Teams can use a SharePoint site for shared content, but SharePoint also serves people who are not members of that Team.

What is SharePoint​

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Be Careful With​

SharePoint can become messy when ownership is unclear. Every important site, library, list, and page needs an owner, a purpose, and a lifecycle. Do not use a homepage to copy content that already has a managed source.

Permissions: Prefer Inheritance​

Let libraries, lists, pages, and items inherit their permissions from the site whenever possible. This gives people a predictable experience and lets owners review access in one place. Break inheritance only for a documented, genuinely different audience, with a named owner who reviews that exception.

Add Purview For Information Policy​

SharePoint provides the sites, libraries, metadata, versions, and permissions used to manage documents. When information also needs organization-wide classification, protection, retention, records, investigation, or compliance controls, add Microsoft Purview. Use Which Microsoft Purview Solution Should You Use? to select the control without treating Purview as a replacement for clear SharePoint structure and ownership.

Learn How SharePoint Works​

Start with the structure behind a site, then see how a page brings that information together, and finally follow what happens for a visitor opening a homepage.

  1. Sites, Libraries, Lists, and Permissions
  2. How a SharePoint Page Is Built
  3. What Happens When You Open a SharePoint Home Page?