What Are SharePoint Solutions?
To answer the question “What is the SharePoint solution?” we must first shift perspective. In technical circles, SharePoint solutions often refer to packaged code, custom web parts, or SharePoint Framework (SPFx) components. But from a business standpoint, SharePoint solutions are far broader and far more strategic.
A Business-Oriented Definition
SharePoint solutions are structured, repeatable approaches to solving organizational challenges using SharePoint’s native capabilities often without writing a single line of code. They represent the intersection of technology, governance, and user experience.
Concrete examples include:
- • A modern SharePoint intranet that serves as the central entry point to information, tools, and services across the organization
- • HR portals that centralize policies, onboarding materials, and employee self-service resources
- • Document hubs that provide structured, searchable access to enterprise content with version control and compliance tracking
- • Project sites that enable cross-functional collaboration while maintaining consistent templates and governance standards
These solutions don’t require custom development. They require thoughtful architecture, clear ownership, and disciplined governance. That’s where most organizations struggle and where the real value lies.
SharePoint Solutions vs Custom Development
It’s essential to differentiate between SharePoint solutions and custom SharePoint development. Custom development,using SPFx, custom web parts, or third-party tools,can extend SharePoint’s functionality. But for most mid-to-large organizations, the primary challenge isn’t missing features. It’s managing complexity, preventing sprawl, and ensuring that SharePoint remains usable and valuable as it scales.
A well-governed SharePoint solution built on native capabilities will almost always outperform a heavily customized environment that lacks structure, ownership, or adoption strategy. Custom development introduces technical debt, upgrade risks, and dependency on specialized skills. Governed solutions, by contrast, are sustainable, scalable, and aligned with Microsoft’s roadmap.
This doesn’t mean customization is wrong,it means it should be the exception, not the default.
| Feature | Native SharePoint (governed) | Custom development (SPFx) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Solve business needs using standard capabilities, structure, and governance | Build specific features or experiences not available out of the box |
| Time to value | Fast: templates, hubs, and native components can be deployed quickly | Slow: requires design, development, testing, and release cycles |
| Scalability | Designed to scale across sites, regions, and teams | Often built for a specific use case; scaling requires rework |
| Gov readiness | Natively aligned with M365 security, compliance, and lifecycle | Governance must be custom-built and maintained manually |
| Roadmap | Evolves with Microsoft’s roadmap; no breaking changes | Risk of breaking changes and upgrade friction |
| Maintenance | Low: relies on standard platform behavior | High: ongoing code maintenance and technical debt |
| Skills | Can be managed by IT and digital workplace teams | Requires specialized developers and long-term tech expertise |
| Adoption | Familiar UX, consistent patterns, easier onboarding | Unique UX can confuse users and increase training needs |
| Risk profile | Predictable, supported by Microsoft | Higher risk: bugs, security gaps, and platform drift |
| Best fit for | Intranets, hubs, document centers, communication | Highly specific business logic or niche functional gaps |
| Long-term cost | Stable and predictable | Grows over time with maintenance and refactoring |
SharePoint Solutions in the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem
SharePoint doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s the structural backbone of Microsoft 365, connecting seamlessly with Teams, OneDrive, Viva, Power Platform, and other productivity tools.
When you create a Team in Microsoft Teams, you’re creating a SharePoint site. When you store files in OneDrive, you’re leveraging SharePoint’s document libraries. When you build a Viva Connections experience, you’re extending SharePoint’s intranet capabilities.
Understanding SharePoint solutions means understanding how SharePoint orchestrates collaboration, content, and communication across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It’s not just a tool, it’s the foundation of your digital workplace.
Common Use Cases for SharePoint Solutions
SharePoint solutions address a wide range of business needs. Here are the most common and impactful use cases for organizations operating at scale.
Intranet and Corporate Portals
A modern SharePoint intranet serves as the central entry point to information, tools, and services. It’s where employees go to find company news, access HR resources, locate policies, and connect with colleagues.
Key SharePoint intranet benefits include:
- • Centralized content that reduces time spent searching for information
- • Personalized access based on role, location, or business unit
- • Multi-site and multilingual support for global organizations
- • Integration with Microsoft 365 apps for seamless workflows
- • Improved findability through enterprise search and metadata
A well-structured SharePoint intranet is not just a communication channel, it’s a strategic asset that supports your broader digital workplace strategy.
Internal Communication and Integrated Communication
SharePoint supports internal communication by centralizing leadership messages, HR announcements, and local team updates in a governed, accessible environment. Unlike email or chat, SharePoint provides persistent, searchable, and structured communication that employees can reference over time.
💡 Recommendation: Integrated Communication
More importantly, governed SharePoint solutions enable true integrated communication – the orchestration of messaging across channels, audiences, and formats. Rather than fragmented messaging scattered across Teams, email, and standalone sites, integrated communication ensures consistency, reduces noise, and improves message retention. For organizations with complex structures multiple entities, geographies, or business units : this capability is transformative.
Collaboration and Project Workspaces
SharePoint project sites and team spaces provide dedicated environments for cross-functional collaboration. Teams can share documents, track tasks, manage timelines, and coordinate work – all within a structured, governed framework.
However, without proper governance, collaboration sites can quickly spiral into sprawl. Uncontrolled site creation leads to duplicated content, unclear ownership, and abandoned workspaces that clutter the environment and confuse users.
The solution isn’t to restrict collaboration : it’s to provide templates, standards, and lifecycle management that enable teams to work freely within guardrails.
Knowledge Management and Document Hubs
Enterprise document management is one of SharePoint’s core strengths. Organizations use SharePoint to centralize policies, procedures, contracts, and institutional knowledge in a secure, compliant, and searchable repository.
Document hubs built on SharePoint provide:
- • Version control and audit trails for compliance and accountability
- • Metadata-driven organization that improves discoverability
- • Permissions management to protect sensitive information
- • Integration with Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and Power Automate
- • Enterprise search that surfaces relevant content across the organization
For regulated industries like healthcare, finance, legal, government, SharePoint’s document management capabilities are often mission-critical.
Here’s an example of a SharePoint Intranet Home Page with all these features (with Powell Intranet)
Benefits of SharePoint Solutions for Organizations
When deployed thoughtfully, SharePoint solutions deliver measurable value across the organization. Here are the key benefits of SharePoint that matter most to IT leaders, Digital Workplace managers, and Internal Communication teams.
Centralized Information and Reduced Digital Friction
Digital friction : the time and effort employees waste searching for information, navigating disconnected tools, or recreating work is a silent productivity killer. SharePoint solutions reduce friction by centralizing information in a unified, accessible environment.
Employees spend less time searching and more time working. IT teams spend less time fielding “where is this?” requests. Leaders gain confidence that critical information is reaching the right people at the right time.
Improved Adoption and Employee Experience
Well-structured SharePoint solutions directly impact employee engagement by improving trust and usability. When employees can reliably find what they need, when the interface is intuitive, and when content is relevant to their role, adoption follows naturally.
Conversely, poorly structured SharePoint environments – cluttered, outdated, or difficult to navigate – erode trust and drive employees toward shadow IT solutions. The difference isn’t the technology. It’s the structure, governance, and experience design.
Scalability and Consistency at Enterprise Level
SharePoint solutions built on templates, standards, and repeatable models scale effortlessly across business units, geographies, and use cases. A well-designed site template can be deployed hundreds of times with minimal effort, ensuring consistency while allowing local customization.
This scalability is critical for large, complex organizations. It enables decentralized execution within centralized governance – empowering local teams without sacrificing control or coherence.
Security, Compliance and Governance
For regulated industries, SharePoint’s security and compliance capabilities are non-negotiable. SharePoint solutions provide:
- • Granular permissions management to control access at the site, library, folder, and item level
- • Audit logs and retention policies to meet regulatory requirements
- • Data loss prevention (DLP) and sensitivity labels to protect confidential information
- • Integration with Microsoft Purview for advanced compliance and information governance
- • Secure external sharing with expiration dates and access reviews
These capabilities aren’t just checkboxes : they’re foundational to operating responsibly in industries where data protection, audit readiness, and regulatory compliance are business-critical.
Challenges When Deploying SharePoint Solutions at Scale
SharePoint’s flexibility is both its greatest strength and its greatest risk. Without structure and governance, SharePoint environments can quickly become chaotic, underutilized, or actively harmful to productivity. Here are the most common pitfalls.
Site and Teams Sprawl
Uncontrolled growth of SharePoint sites and Microsoft Teams is one of the most pervasive challenges in Microsoft 365 environments. When anyone can create a site or Team without oversight, the result is predictable: duplicated content, unclear ownership, abandoned workspaces, and a cluttered, confusing user experience.
Sprawl isn’t just an aesthetic problem : it’s a governance, security, and productivity problem. Orphaned sites become security risks. Duplicated content creates version control nightmares. Employees lose trust in the platform when they can’t find what they need.
Lack of Governance and Ownership
Effective intranet governance is essential to prevent site sprawl and ensure long-term value. Yet many organizations deploy SharePoint without defining clear ownership, lifecycle management, or content standards.
Who owns this site? Who’s responsible for keeping content current? What happens when the project ends? When these questions go unanswered, SharePoint environments decay. Clear ownership and processes are at the heart of effective intranet management.
Adoption and Change Management
Tools alone do not drive usage. SharePoint solutions require enablement, training, communication, and ongoing support to achieve meaningful adoption. Too often, organizations focus on deployment and neglect the human side of change.
Employees need to understand not just how to use SharePoint, but why it matters. They need champions, clear use cases, and visible leadership support. Without these elements, even the best-designed SharePoint solution will underperform.
Over-Customization and Technical Debt
Heavy customization, custom web parts, third-party integrations, complex workflows can seem like a shortcut to functionality. But it’s often a long-term risk. Custom code requires maintenance, creates upgrade friction, and introduces dependencies on specialized skills.
As Microsoft 365 evolves, heavily customized environments struggle to keep pace. Native capabilities improve, but custom solutions remain frozen in time or worse, break during updates. The result is technical debt that constrains agility and increases cost.
Feature example of document management with a SharePoint Intranet (with Powell Intranet)
Best Practices for Successful SharePoint Solutions
Deploying SharePoint solutions at enterprise scale requires discipline, strategy, and a focus on long-term value. Here are the best practices that separate successful implementations from failed ones.
1. Start from Business and Employee Needs
Use-case-first thinking beats feature-first thinking every time. Don’t start with “What can SharePoint do?” Start with “What do our employees need to do their jobs effectively?” Map SharePoint solutions to real business problems: reducing time to find information, improving cross-functional collaboration, ensuring compliance, supporting remote work. When solutions are grounded in genuine needs, adoption follows naturally.
2. Design Solutions That Scale
Scalability isn’t just about handling more users : it’s about replicating success without reinventing the wheel. Promote templates, hubs, and standardized architectures that enable local teams to deploy solutions quickly while maintaining consistency. A well-designed hub site architecture, for example, allows business units to create their own sites within a governed framework. They get autonomy. You get control. Everyone wins.
3. Define Governance Early
Governance isn’t a constraint, it’s an enabler. Effective intranet governance prevents chaos, protects security, and ensures that SharePoint remains valuable as it scales.
Define governance early, before deployment. Establish:
- • Site creation policies: Who can create sites? What approval process is required?
- • Ownership and lifecycle management: Who owns each site? What happens when projects end?
- • Content standards: What metadata is required? What naming conventions apply?
- • Permissions management: How are access rights granted and reviewed?
- • Monitoring and compliance: How do you track usage, identify risks, and enforce policies?
Governance isn’t a one-time exercise : it’s an ongoing discipline that evolves with your organization.
Measure Usage and Continuously Improve
What gets measured gets managed. Use Microsoft 365 analytics, SharePoint usage reports, and adoption metrics to understand how employees interact with SharePoint solutions.
Which sites are thriving? Which are abandoned? Where are employees struggling? Use data to identify opportunities for improvement, celebrate successes, and course-correct when needed.
Continuous improvement – not one-time deployment – is the hallmark of mature SharePoint solutions.
The Role of Governance in SharePoint Solutions
Governance is the single most important factor in SharePoint success. It’s also the most overlooked. Let’s explore why governance matters and how to implement it effectively.
Why Governance Is Critical for SharePoint Success
Without governance, SharePoint’s value erodes as it scales. What starts as a flexible, empowering platform becomes a chaotic, frustrating liability. Sites proliferate without oversight. Content becomes outdated. Permissions become unmanageable. Employees lose trust.
Governance prevents this decay. It ensures that SharePoint remains structured, secure, and valuable, even as usage grows and evolves. Governance isn’t about control for control’s sake. It’s about protecting the investment and ensuring long-term ROI.
Governance Across Sites, Content and Users
Effective intranet management requires governance across three dimensions:
- Site governance: Controlling site creation, enforcing templates, managing lifecycles, and preventing sprawl.
- Content governance: Establishing metadata standards, content ownership, review cycles, and archival policies.
- User governance: Managing permissions, access reviews, external sharing, and compliance with data protection regulations.
Each dimension requires clear policies, defined roles, and technical controls. Together, they create a governed environment that balances flexibility with control.
Linking SharePoint Solutions to Digital Workplace Strategy
SharePoint solutions play a foundational role in any digital workplace strategy built on Microsoft 365. The digital workplace isn’t just a collection of tools, it’s an integrated environment that supports how employees communicate, collaborate, and access information.
SharePoint provides the structure. Teams provides the conversation. Viva provides the experience layer. Together, they form a cohesive digital workplace that drives productivity, engagement, and business outcomes.
But this only works when SharePoint is governed, structured, and aligned with broader organizational goals. Ad hoc SharePoint deployments undermine digital workplace initiatives. Strategic SharePoint solutions enable them.
How Powell Builds Scalable SharePoint Solutions on Microsoft 365
Powell helps organizations move beyond native SharePoint capabilities to build scalable, governed, and user-friendly solutions that drive adoption and deliver long-term value.
Structuring SharePoint Beyond Native Capabilities
While SharePoint provides powerful native features, it lacks the out-of-the-box structure, governance tools, and user experience refinements that large organizations need. Powell intranet enhances SharePoint by adding:
- • Pre-built templates and design systems that accelerate deployment and ensure consistency
- • Advanced governance controls that prevent sprawl and enforce lifecycle management
- • Enhanced navigation and personalization that improve usability and employee experience
- • Integration layers that connect SharePoint with Teams, Viva, and other Microsoft 365 tools seamlessly
Powell doesn’t replace SharePoint: it amplifies it, making it easier to deploy, govern, and scale without heavy customization.
Enabling IT and Comms Teams to Work Together
One of the biggest barriers to SharePoint success is the disconnect between IT and Internal Communication teams. IT owns the platform. Internal communications owns the content. Neither owns the experience.
Powell bridges this gap by providing tools and frameworks that enable cross-functional employee collaboration. IT gets governance and control. Comms gets flexibility and autonomy. Employees get a coherent, valuable experience.
This alignment- technical capability meeting business need : is where Powell’s value truly shines.
Supporting Adoption, Governance and Long-Term Value
Powell isn’t a one-off solution – it’s a long-term partner in your SharePoint journey. From initial deployment through ongoing optimization, Powell provides:
- • Adoption support and change management guidance to drive employee engagement
- • Governance frameworks and best practices tailored to your industry and organizational complexity
- • Continuous improvement tools that help you measure, learn, and optimize over time
- • Expert consulting and support from teams who understand enterprise SharePoint at scale
SharePoint solutions are not a project, they’re a program. Powell helps you sustain value long after go-live.
Conclusion
SharePoint solutions are about structure, governance, and experience, not just technology. The organizations that succeed with SharePoint are those that treat it as a strategic platform, not a technical tool.
They start from business needs. They design for scale. They govern proactively. They measure and improve continuously. And they recognize that SharePoint’s value comes not from what it can do, but from how it’s deployed, managed, and experienced.
Whether you’re building a modern SharePoint intranet, enabling integrated communication, or managing enterprise content at scale, the principles remain the same: structure beats customization, governance beats flexibility, and experience beats features.
Powell Software partners with organizations to build SharePoint solutions that scale, engage, and deliver lasting value within Microsoft 365. If you’re ready to move beyond ad hoc deployments and build a governed, strategic SharePoint environment, we’re here to help.
Frequently Asked Questions About SharePoint Solutions
What is the SharePoint solution?
A SharePoint solution is a structured, repeatable approach to using SharePoint to solve business challenges such as building a custom intranet, managing documents, enabling collaboration, or supporting internal communication. While the term can refer to custom development (SPFx, web parts), most organizations benefit more from governed, scalable configurations built on SharePoint’s native capabilities.
What exactly does SharePoint do in Microsoft 365?
SharePoint serves as the structural backbone of Microsoft 365. It powers document storage, intranet sites, team collaboration spaces, and enterprise content management. When you create a Team in Microsoft Teams, you’re creating a SharePoint site. When you use Viva Connections, you’re extending SharePoint. SharePoint orchestrates content, collaboration, and communication across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Are SharePoint solutions only for developers?
No. While developers can extend SharePoint with custom code, most SharePoint solutions are built using native features, templates, and configurations, no coding required. The real challenge for most organizations isn’t building features; it’s scaling, governing, and ensuring adoption. SharePoint solutions are for IT leaders, Digital Workplace managers, and Internal Communication teams, not just developers.
How do SharePoint solutions support digital workplace initiatives?
SharePoint solutions play a foundational role in any digital workplace strategy built on Microsoft 365. They provide the structure for intranets, the repository for content, the foundation for collaboration, and the governance layer that ensures security and compliance. A well-governed SharePoint environment enables the broader digital workplace vision by connecting tools, content, and people in a coherent, accessible ecosystem.
How do you govern SharePoint solutions at scale?
Governing SharePoint at scale requires clear policies, defined ownership, and technical controls across three dimensions: site governance (controlling creation and lifecycle), content governance (metadata, ownership, review cycles), and user governance (permissions, access reviews, compliance). Effective intranet governance prevents sprawl, protects security, and ensures long-term value. Tools like Powell Software enhance native SharePoint governance capabilities, making it easier to enforce policies and maintain control as usage grows.
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