SharePoint and OneDrive, Structured
OneDrive is a person's drawer. SharePoint is the filing room. Confusing them causes most of the trouble.
The single most common Microsoft 365 problem is not technical: it is that nobody decided which documents belong to a person and which belong to the organisation. Work saved in OneDrive leaves when its owner does, and that discovery is usually made at the worst possible moment.
The distinction that matters
OneDrive is individual storage — drafts, personal working copies, things that genuinely belong to one person. SharePoint is shared organisational storage, where the document survives the employee.
Getting this wrong is quiet and expensive. A project's only copy of a contract sitting in a departed colleague's OneDrive is a real scenario, and recovering it is considerably harder than putting it in the right place would have been.
Site and library structure
Sites that match how the business is organised, with libraries that people can navigate without being told where things are.
Permissions
Access by group rather than by person, so a joiner or leaver is one change and not twenty.
Sharing controls
What may be shared externally, whether links expire, and whether anonymous links are permitted at all.
Retention
How long documents are kept and what happens at the end, which is a DPDP Act, 2023 consideration as well as a housekeeping one.
Migration is the moment to restructure
Moving from a file server or from Google Drive is the only comfortable opportunity you will get to fix a folder structure that has grown for a decade. Lifting it across unchanged means importing every problem along with the files.
It is also worth deciding what not to migrate. Data that has not been opened in five years is rarely worth the effort of moving, and archiving it separately is cheaper than carrying it.
SharePoint & OneDrive — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between OneDrive and SharePoint?+
OneDrive is individual storage for drafts and personal working copies; SharePoint is shared organisational storage where a document survives the person who created it. Work that matters to the business belongs in SharePoint.
What happens to OneDrive files when someone leaves?+
They are retained for a configurable period and then removed. This is exactly why organisational documents should not live there — a departure should not put a contract at risk.
Can we control external sharing?+
Yes, in detail — whether external sharing is allowed at all, whether links expire, and whether anonymous links are permitted. It is worth deciding deliberately rather than accepting the default.
Should we restructure during migration?+
Yes. Migration is the only comfortable opportunity to fix a folder structure that has grown for years. Lifting it across unchanged imports every existing problem along with the files.
How do permissions work best?+
By group rather than by individual, so a joiner or leaver is one change instead of twenty. Per-person permissions accumulate into a state nobody can audit.
Is our data stored in India?+
Microsoft operates data centres in India, and data residency depends on how the tenant was provisioned. It is worth confirming for your specific tenant rather than assuming, particularly if you have contractual commitments about it.
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