Have you found yourself asking this question, “Should I implement SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or both in my organization?” Many business leaders ask themselves this same question, and this post aims to make things clearer.
Why the confusion about which tool to use?
Both SharePoint and MS Teams are Microsoft products, but:
- MS Team is four years old (as of this writing), and naturally, Microsoft has been adding many new features to it and promoting them.
- SharePoint is a mature product with almost 20 years of history. There are also a lot of new features being added to SharePoint, but some say that SharePoint gets less PR because it’s an already well-known productivity tool.
Some organizations feel that SharePoint and Microsoft Teams are solving the same problem, and others disagree. So what should you do?
What’s the cost of choosing the wrong tool?
Here are some of the implications of choosing the wrong tool:
- Time spent on setting up the tool
- Time spent on the learning and training your staff
- Costs of troubleshooting issues and hiring an expert
- Tool fatigue – more unhelpful tools overwhelm employees
- Retooling – starting all over and moving the data
- So you definitely want to be sure before going all-in.
How are SharePoint and Microsoft Teams similar?
Here are some of the most common problems companies try to solve when comparing Teams and SharePoint:
- Collaboration
- Document Management
- Project Management and Tracking
- Corporate Communication
- Learning and Development
- Workflow and Process Automation
How are SharePoint and Teams different in comparison to one another?
| Use | MS Teams | SharePoint |
| Collaboration | Features to collaborate real-time: video calls, brainstorming workspace, instant chat, simultaneous document editing, etc. | Features to collaborate at your own pace: task lists, tracking boards, simultaneous document editing, etc. |
| Document Management | Features where members of a channel can access channel-specific documents. Behind the scenes, this feature is facilitated in MS Teams by SharePoint. | Features to search, access, and categorize a wide range of documents. |
| Project Management and Tracking | Simple tasks and to-do’s, Power BI | Tasks, to-do’s, project plans, Power BI |
| Corporate Communication | Communication between members of a channel in a chat-like format. Allows inserting of SharePoint pages into MS Teams for more complex communication | Full-size pages, news pages, and rich media communication. Support targeted communication to a group of employees. |
| Learning and Development | Employees can access content from your existing LMS and other sources. This feature is facilitated by Viva learning. | Page-like experience where employees can navigate WIKIs, Pages, documents, and other training material. |
| Workflows and Process Automation | Employees can trigger simpler workflows related to a document or channel activity. This feature uses PowerAutomate behind the scenes. For more complex applications, you can insert SharePoint pages into MS Teams | Allows to easily access PowerApps applications from SharePoint and trigger PowerAutomate workflows from within document libraries. |
Use Cases: Best Tool for the Job
- Collaboration – Since most collaboration is real-time nowadays, MS Teams is best for this
- Document Management – SharePoint makes it easier to find and update documents
- Project Management – SharePoint offers a richer set of tools for project management and tracking.
- Corporate Communication – SharePoint offers a richer, cleaner, and more organized corporate communication experience. SharePoint sites can be up and running in a few minutes with the free templates from SharePoint Lookbook.
- Learning and Development – both SharePoint and MS Teams have equal capabilities for this goal
- Workflow and Process Automation – SharePoint is better integrated, but MS Teams is quickly catching up
Get the best of both worlds
SharePoint is not in conflict with MS Teams, and many features in MS Teams are behind the scenes running SharePoint. For smaller organizations migrating from, say Google drive, starting with MS Teams is probably the best way to go. We recommend keeping the existing processes in SharePoint for larger organizations who already use SharePoint while at the same time slowly introducing MS Teams for real-time collaboration between employees.
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