Microsoft Teams vs SharePoint – Which one do I need in 2024?

During this transition, you will inevitably encounter two of the biggest collaboration tools – SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. That’s when you’ll probably ask yourself “Which one do I need?“ and end up in the Teams vs SharePoint dilemma and ask yourself “What are the differences between SharePoint and Microsoft Teams?“.

To make the best possible decision for your company, you need to understand what each one of them does. So, let‘s dig into some basic history and use cases to help you decide who the winner is in Teams vs SharePoint.

SharePoint

SharePoint is the older of the two options – it‘s been around since 2001. It allows you to organize, store, and share your documents with both colleagues and external partners.

Where SharePoint shines is document collaboration, as it offers advanced features like:

• Document versioning control, approval workflows
• Document co-authoring with the online versions of Office applications
• The OneDrive sync client works on Windows or Mac, so it’s easy to sync all the files
• SharePoint provides previews for hundreds of file types – without you having to install the file’s application
• SharePoint has comprehensive data governance and compliance features. These include:
  1. Automatic classification and labeling
  2. Data loss prevention
  3. Retention policies and reviews
  4. eDiscovery and legal holds
• Files are discoverable in Delve and SharePoint search

SharePoint gives you a lot of freedom on how to organize your sites, document libraries, and folders to better suit your needs.

Although not recommended in modern sites, you can even create subsites and SharePoint groups to apply advanced permissions structure just the way you want it. SharePoint has a lot of options to customize and so boost the efficiency of your business processes. Depending on your needs, you can use low-code solutions like Power Apps and Power Automate to automate your processes or full–blown custom code solutions calling SharePoint APIs.

So, stating all of the above, what could possibly be the downside of SharePoint? It is people and how we collaborate to accomplish our work.

As we mentioned above, SharePoint has been around for many years now, including when it was normal to use separate apps to perform your tasks.  For instance, you would need to switch from your SharePoint to Exchange when you want to send an email to your team members. You would then have to manually enter each email one by one.

SharePoint did tackle this by focusing more on communication and social elements, with features like Newsfeeds and Discussion Lists.

However, something big happened in 2017. Microsoft introduced Microsoft Teams – a solution that swept away all the challenges of this new, ever–connected modern workplace.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration.

It provides a single UI for multiple Microsoft 365 products, such as:

• Exchange Online shared mailbox and calendar
• Planner
• OneNote
• SharePoint Online
• Power BI
• Integration with custom apps

This multifunctionality reduces the number of tabbing and context switching during your work.

Microsoft Teams uses Microsoft 365 Groups to ensure all the products share the same security context. It simplifies management as all group members‘ permissions are automatically applied to all Teams resources.

You can create a new team inside the Microsoft Teams interface for each of your business teams or projects. Inside a team, you can create channels – each for a different area of your project. It‘s easy to chat, email, share documents, or have meetings within a team.

All files shared in Microsoft Teams are stored in SharePoint Online, so you keep all the advantages that SharePoint offers. That includes the files you access by clicking the Files tab in MS Teams. This tab is simply a way to directly access files stored in SharePoint.

Each new team automatically creates a SharePoint site, and each new channel will create a folder inside the document library on that site. It’s also worth mentioning that files shared in a one–on–one chat are stored in the sender’s OneDrive for Business.

Final verdict in Teams vs SharePoint: Which one do I need?

Let‘s look at the following use cases to understand possible choices.

For teams and projects where there is a lot of daily collaboration, Microsoft Teams would be the better choice. It allows you to be more productive and focus on your work with less unnecessary context switching.

Most Teams users won‘t even know there is a SharePoint Online site behind the Files tab, and that’s completely fine. Microsoft Teams can simplify things by giving a central point for all conversations, meetings, files, plans, and other projects.

However, remember that not all communication should happen in Teams. Imagine that you are a marketing team leader who has an important announcement to make about the web rebranding project deadline. If you post that in Teams, only currently active members will see it. There is a good chance that members who are unavailable at the time or out of the office will miss it. On top of that, Teams’ search experience for messages is poor, and history scrolling is very slow.

That being said, it’s a better choice to post such an announcement in a SharePoint site’s Newsfeed, from where it is visible on your site’s Home page.

Exchange is another preferable option – if you send an email to every team member, you can be sure that everyone will get a message. It will also make it easy for them to find it in the future if they forget about some details.

On the other hand, if you rarely chat and you just need a repository for your documents – stick to SharePoint. SharePoint is a better choice when you need the advanced structure of subsites, with multiple document libraries and custom folders that are not related to your Teams channels.

SharePoint sites allow you to apply more advanced permissions and control structures using SharePoint groups. At the same time, in Teams, you are limited to sharing documents individually or in a channel. All in all, SharePoint offers more options but can be a lot more complicated for an average end-user.

Teams vs SharePoint – Why not both?

There is no obvious winner in the Teams vs SharePoint match. Which tool will you choose depends on your needs – it could even be both.

Now that you understand what both SharePoint and Microsoft Teams are and what their advantages are, it should be easy to figure out which one to use, should you move to either one of them, or even use both. We hope this article helped you tackle the Teams vs SharePoint dilemma.

To organize everything inside both platforms, check out Syskit Point. It’s a SharePoint and Microsoft 365 security and governance platform that specializes in permissions governance and Microsoft Teams monitoring.