The most common uses of SharePoint include:
Enterprise content and document management SharePoint allows storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting on
electronic documents and records. Many of the functions in this product are designed around various legal, information management, and process requirements in organizations. SharePoint also provides search and "graph" functionality. SharePoint allows
collaborative real-time editing and encrypted/
information-rights-managed synchronization by providing the underlying technical infrastructure for
Microsoft OneDrive. SharePoint is often used to replace or supplement an existing corporate
file server, and is typically coupled with an
enterprise content management policy.
Intranet and social network A SharePoint
intranet or
intranet portal is a way to centralize access to enterprise information and applications. It is a tool that helps an organization manage its internal communications, applications and
information more easily. By providing the tools to capture and share
explicit knowledge in an organisation, Microsoft claims organizational improvements in
employee training,
employee engagement,
business process management,
organizational communication, and
crisis management. These capabilities are usually centered around "Communication sites" (previously, "Publishing sites").
Group collaboration SharePoint contains team collaboration
groupware capabilities, including:
document / file management,
project scheduling (integrated with
Outlook and
Project), and other information tracking. This capability is centred around "team sites". Team sites are created whenever a
Microsoft Teams team is created, but they are also created independently of these, and have been a feature of SharePoint since 2001.
Storage in Microsoft 365 SharePoint stores most content in a Microsoft 365 tenant.
OneDrive is a per-user SharePoint site,
Microsoft Teams channel files reside in a SharePoint site provisioned per team, and
Microsoft Loop components are stored in OneDrive, SharePoint, or SharePoint Embedded containers.
Microsoft Graph exposes this content as a unified API.
SharePoint Embedded, generally available since May 2024, exposes the same storage platform as a headless service for third-party applications, which hold data in tenant-bound containers accessed through Microsoft Graph.
Search and AI Microsoft Search is the tenant-wide search runtime over SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 content, and
Microsoft 365 Copilot grounds responses in the same content through a permissions-trimmed semantic index. Both honour SharePoint permissions at site, list, item, and file level. SharePoint agents, generally available since November 2024, are scoped retrieval agents stored as .agent files; each site has a default agent and users with edit rights can create custom ones, all inheriting the underlying SharePoint permissions and sensitivity labels.
Custom web applications SharePoint sites can host custom web applications built on the
SharePoint Framework (SPFx), typically as
React components written in
TypeScript. The component renders in the SharePoint page and consumes
Microsoft Graph for tenant data. Server-side logic is hosted separately, typically as an
Azure Function consuming other
Azure Services, with user authentication passed through a token issued by
Microsoft Entra ID. SharePoint sites and lists are commonly used as low-code data stores for these applications, with
Power Apps and
Power Automate providing forms and process orchestration. On SharePoint Server, customisation historically used the on-premises Add-in model and full-trust farm solutions for similar scenarios; these are covered under
developing on SharePoint Server. == Configuration, integration, and customization ==