In short
SharePoint is the Microsoft 365 service organisations use to build internal websites, store and share files, and publish news. For internal communicators it is the publishing layer of Microsoft 365: communication sites, the home site and organisation news are the parts you own and should learn first, while team sites and OneDrive belong to collaboration and stay out of your reach figures.
Key takeaways
- Microsoft says SharePoint serves more than 1 billion users a year, with 2 million new sites created every day (March 2026).
- Every new team in Microsoft Teams automatically gets a connected SharePoint site, so most sites in a tenant are collaboration spaces, not communication channels.
- Microsoft’s three intranet building blocks are team sites (collaborate), communication sites (communicate) and hub sites (connect); comms usually owns the last two.
- A home site is a communication site that is set as an official source of organisational news by default and is the base of the SharePoint app in Teams (formerly Viva Connections).
- In Tryane’s Digital Workplaces Benchmark 2026, SharePoint scored 68/100 overall, with 88% for administration but 45% for analytics, the lowest analytics score of the 12 platforms reviewed.
What is SharePoint?
SharePoint is Microsoft’s platform for creating internal websites, managing content and sharing files inside an organisation. In Microsoft 365 it runs as a cloud service alongside OneDrive, and Microsoft describes the pair as services that help organisations share and manage content, knowledge and applications so people can work together and find information quickly[1]. Microsoft’s own user guide is even shorter: organisations use SharePoint to create websites, which give people a secure place to store, organise and share information from any device with a browser[2].
The scale is hard to overstate. In March 2026, at SharePoint’s 25th anniversary, Microsoft reported that it serves more than 1 billion users each year, with over 2 billion files uploaded and 2 million SharePoint sites created every day[3]. The same post calls SharePoint the “communication system of record” that authors use to publish company updates, and the number one grounding source for Microsoft 365 Copilot. In other words, what you publish on SharePoint is also what Copilot reads when employees ask it questions about your organisation.
There is also an on-premises product, SharePoint Server, which some organisations still run or migrate from. This guide is about SharePoint in Microsoft 365, the version most internal communication teams work with today.
What is SharePoint used for?
Most organisations use SharePoint for four jobs at once, which is why the word means different things to different people in the same meeting. Microsoft’s user guide lists the everyday tasks: uploading files to document libraries, co-authoring a document with colleagues at the same time, keeping and restoring previous versions, adding lists, searching, and posting news to share information with the organisation[2].
| Job | What it looks like in SharePoint | Who usually owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Document management | Document libraries, version history, co-authoring, sharing links | Each team, under IT policies |
| Team collaboration | Team sites, most of them created automatically behind Microsoft Teams | Team owners |
| Intranet and news | Communication sites, the home site, hub navigation, news posts | Internal communication, with site owners in each function |
| Lists and simple business processes | Lists that work like shared, interactive spreadsheets | Business teams, often with IT support |
Only the third row is internal communication. The other three generate most of the activity in a tenant, and that is where confusion about SharePoint numbers usually starts.
How does SharePoint relate to Teams and OneDrive?
SharePoint sits underneath much of Microsoft 365. Microsoft states that SharePoint is deeply integrated into Teams and that files stored in Teams are stored in SharePoint sites[1]. When someone creates a new team, a Teams-connected SharePoint site is created automatically, and every private or shared channel gets its own separate site as well[4]. The Files tab in a Teams channel is simply a folder in that site’s document library.
OneDrive is personal file storage that runs on the same platform. Nobody publishes to it and it has no audience, so it never belongs in a communication figure. Our article on OneDrive and SharePoint explains how the two get blended in reports.
The practical consequence for comms: in an organisation of a few thousand people there can be thousands of SharePoint sites, and almost all of them are collaboration spaces. Imagine someone hands you a slide that says “SharePoint: 41,000 monthly active users” for a 38,000-person organisation. The figure is real, but it counts team sites, channel sites and file activity alongside your intranet. It describes platform usage, not intranet reach.
Which SharePoint sites matter to internal communicators?
Microsoft describes three building blocks for an intranet: team sites for collaboration, communication sites for communication and hub sites for connection[5].
| Site type | Built for | Authors and readers | Role for comms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team site | A group working together on files, tasks and plans; connected to a Microsoft 365 group and to Teams | All members create and edit content | Not a communication channel; keep it out of reach reporting |
| Communication site | Broadcasting news, telling stories, sharing policies and resources for reading rather than editing | A small number of authors, a much larger number of readers | Your main publishing surface: the intranet, department portals, campaign sites |
| Hub site | Connecting a family of related sites with shared navigation, branding, news roll-up and a shared search scope | Hub owner sets navigation and theme; each site owner publishes on their own site | The structure of your intranet, for example an HR hub or a country hub |
Two details from Microsoft’s hub guidance matter for comms. A site can be associated with only one hub, and news flows up from associated sites to the hub, never down. If you want the broadest reach for a story, publish it on the hub itself[5]. How to plan and build the intranet itself is covered in why choose SharePoint to build your intranet, and what the word intranet should cover in your reporting is in what is an intranet.
How do the home site and news fit together?
The home site is the front door of a SharePoint intranet. Microsoft defines it as a communication site with special capabilities: it provides a branded landing experience, searches across the entire intranet rather than one site, enables global navigation in the SharePoint app bar, and is set as the organisational news source by default. News posted from the home site automatically becomes official organisational news and takes priority on the SharePoint start page[6].
Administrators can mark further sites as organisation news sites, up to 100 of them. Their posts get a distinct visual treatment and appear on the SharePoint start page, and a home site is configured as an organisation news site automatically[7]. That designation is what separates official corporate news from the thousands of news posts that team and department sites publish.
The home site is also the base of the SharePoint app in Teams, the experience Microsoft previously called Viva Connections. It brings SharePoint news, a dashboard of cards, announcements and curated resources into Microsoft Teams on desktop and mobile[8]. For frontline and mobile employees this is often the main way they meet your SharePoint content, without ever opening the intranet in a browser.
Finally, audience targeting lets site owners show pages, navigation links, news posts and certain web parts to specific Microsoft Entra ID groups, including dynamic groups[9]. Without it, everything is published to everyone, and you have no intended audience to measure reach against.
Where you post decides who sees it
A story on a department site rolls up to its hub but not to the home site. A story on the home site or another organisation news site is treated as official news across SharePoint and the SharePoint app in Teams. Choose the site before you write the post.
Which parts of SharePoint should comms own, and which belong to IT?
Most of what you can publish and measure on SharePoint was fixed by configuration decisions that IT took, often years before your team arrived. A clear split saves months of back-and-forth.
| Usually owned by internal communication | Usually owned by IT or the digital workplace team |
|---|---|
| Content and layout of the home site and communication sites | Setting the home site and organisation news sites in the SharePoint admin center |
| News planning, approval flow and which site each story is posted on | Creating hub sites and deciding who may associate sites with them |
| Hub navigation for the intranet | Site creation policy, Teams-connected sites and OneDrive |
| Using audience targeting on pages, news and links | Maintaining the Entra ID groups that targeting relies on |
| Reading site usage data and acting on it | Tenant-level usage reports, retention and data protection settings |
If you are new to an organisation, ask four questions in your first weeks. Is corporate news posted on a designated organisation news site, or scattered across department sites? Is audience targeting switched on, and are the groups behind it maintained? Do the hubs match how people actually work, or the legal entity chart? And does anyone export usage data before it rolls out of the reporting window? The answers usually explain why existing SharePoint reporting is thin.
Where is SharePoint strong and weak for internal communication?
We assessed SharePoint alongside 11 other intranet and employee communication platforms in our Digital Workplaces Benchmark 2026, using demonstrations, expert interviews and public information. SharePoint received an overall Tryane Score of 68/100, the lowest of the 12 platforms[10]. This is Tryane’s own assessment, not an analyst ranking.
| Category | SharePoint score | Highest score among the 12 platforms |
|---|---|---|
| Administration | 88% | 94% |
| Publishing | 72% | 93% |
| Targeting | 72% | 95% |
| UI/UX | 65% | 92% |
| Analytics | 45% | 92% |
The pattern is clear. SharePoint is strongest where IT works: it rated 5 out of 5 for admin role management, ease of authentication and interoperability with other environments. It is weakest where comms works: look and feel, a customisable interface and analytics each rated 2 out of 5. Our summary in the benchmark is that SharePoint is “a must-have platform, but requires customization to be truly effective for internal communications”. For the full scores and criteria of all 12 platforms, download the Digital Workplace Benchmark 2026.
For comms teams that means three things. Plan design effort for the home site and news templates. Rely on audience targeting and the SharePoint app in Teams to reach people where they work. And do not expect SharePoint’s own reports to tell you whether a message reached its intended audience. Our article on what SharePoint does well as a communication channel goes deeper on the trade-offs.
How can you see who reads your SharePoint content?
SharePoint gives you two native views. Site usage, on each site, shows unique viewers, site visits, average time spent per user, popular content for the last seven days, visits by device and by time of day. Unique viewers and visits are available for 7, 30 and 90 days, and you can download the 90-day data as a .csv. Hub analytics combine up to 200 associated sites. Some gaps are documented: activity from the last 60 minutes is not included, and mobile app usage is not counted in average time spent[11].
The second view is the tenant-wide SharePoint site usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center. It covers every site, with files, active files, storage, page views and pages visited over 7, 30, 90 or 180 days[12]. That is useful to IT, and it is where the 41,000 figure comes from.
The discipline that keeps your reporting honest is to write down, per surface, what the number lets you claim and what it does not.
| Surface | What the number is | What you may claim | What you may not claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home site and organisation news | Unique viewers and visits per page or news post | That this many distinct people opened this item in this period | That they read or understood it, or that non-viewers were unreached |
| Department sites in a hub | Per-site usage, or hub analytics across up to 200 sites | Activity per site and per hub | A total across hubs, or across SharePoint and other channels |
| Team sites | Collaboration activity across many groups | Platform adoption, useful to IT | Anything about internal communication performance |
| OneDrive | Personal file activity | Storage and sync behaviour | Any communication claim |
| Tenant-wide site usage report | All sites added together | Licence and platform usage | Intranet reach |
What native reporting does not do is break readership down by department, country or role, connect SharePoint to Viva Engage, Teams and email, or keep history beyond its reporting windows. Our guides to using SharePoint native analytics and the limits of SharePoint native analytics cover both sides in detail.
That gap is what Tryane Analytics for SharePoint closes. It shows who reads your SharePoint news and pages by department, country and role, and as part of Communication Insights it puts SharePoint, Viva Engage, the SharePoint app in Teams and email newsletters in one dashboard, so you can adapt your publishing to the audiences you are actually reaching. To see it on your own intranet, book a 15-minute call with Jérémy via his Calendly.
Frequently asked questions
Is SharePoint an intranet?
SharePoint is the platform an intranet is usually built on, which is not the same thing. Your intranet is the home site, the communication sites and the hubs that connect them. The rest of SharePoint, mainly team sites behind Microsoft Teams, is collaboration.
What is the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive?
OneDrive is personal file storage for each employee, while SharePoint hosts shared sites for teams and the whole organisation. Both run on the same Microsoft 365 platform, which is why their activity is easily mixed up in usage reports.
Do we need SharePoint if we already use Microsoft Teams?
You already have it. Every team in Microsoft Teams stores its files in a SharePoint site that is created automatically. What Teams does not give you on its own is an intranet: a home site, communication sites and official news, which you build in SharePoint.
What is the SharePoint app in Teams?
It is the experience Microsoft previously called Viva Connections. Built on your SharePoint home site, it brings news, a dashboard of cards, announcements and resources into Microsoft Teams on desktop and mobile, which makes it a key route to frontline employees.
Why is our SharePoint user count higher than our headcount?
Usually because the figure is a tenant-wide total that includes team sites, channel sites and file activity, sometimes with guests, and counts activity over a period rather than distinct readers of your intranet. It is a valid platform metric, not an intranet reach figure.
Who should own SharePoint in an organisation?
Ownership is shared. IT or the digital workplace team owns the tenant, admin settings, site creation and data policies. Internal communication should own the home site content, organisation news, communication sites and how audience targeting is used.
Sources
Further reading
• OneDrive and SharePoint: Why the Confusion Corrupts Your Intranet Numbers
• Why choose SharePoint to build your intranet ?
• SharePoint Communication Reach: Why the Native Number Reads High, and How to Fix It
• Using SharePoint Native Analytics: How to Read It Properly, and the Four Questions It Cannot Answer
• Tryane vs SharePoint Native Analytics: The Four Gaps Native Cannot Close
If you want to see what cross-channel reporting looks like against your real data, Tryane runs a 15-minute walkthrough with no slides. Book a slot with Jérémy.