As a technical writer, I know most organisations don’t lack documents, but they do struggle to find a specific document. We will hear them muttering, “Where is it?” as they search. After hours of hunting, they finally located the document buried in an obscure location in their SharePoint. This represents a failure in information control.
I once worked for a government quango. One of the IT staff moaned about SharePoint: “It’s useless,” he said, “I uploaded a document and lost it.”
I faced him and asked a question. “Did you create a folder?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the name of the folder?”
“Don’t know.”
“Title of the document?”
“Something to do with the network.”
After fifteen minutes, I found it in an obscure folder hidden among many others.
That is why so many SharePoint environments become digital graveyards. I conducted an analysis of a client’s document system and Confluence and found.
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- Thousands of files
- Endless folders
- Duplicate content with no owner
- Outdated procedures
- Unowned documents
- Broken permissions
- Conflicting versions
- No trust in the information
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The problem is not SharePoint, but how teams use it, because companies do not learn how it should work and train people.
People treat SharePoint like a filing cabinet.
Many businesses deploy Microsoft SharePoint, expecting it to solve:
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- Knowledge management
- Collaboration
- Governance
- Information retrieval
- Document control
- workflows
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But SharePoint is a platform. Not an information strategy.
Without governance, people recreate old network-drive behaviour:
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- Department folders
- Personal silos
- Random naming conventions
- “Final_v2_REAL_FINAL”
- Uncontrolled uploads
- Duplicate libraries
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The organisation digitises its chaos.
Nobody owns the information lifecycle
While documents are easy to create, they are much harder to maintain.
Most organisations focus on:
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- Creating information
- Migrating information
- Storing information
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Very few focus on:
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- Reviewing information
- Archiving information
- Retiring information
- Validating accuracy
- Removing ROT
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Technical authors and information managers often use the acronym:
ROT
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- Redundant
- Outdated
- Trivial
Over time, ROT spreads everywhere.
And because nobody wants to delete anything:
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- Old procedures remain searchable
- Obsolete guidance survives indefinitely
- Legacy templates continue circulating
- Users lose confidence in what they find
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Eventually, staff stop trusting SharePoint altogether.
Search Becomes Meaningless
Search only works well when information is:
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- Structured
- Tagged properly
- Consistent
- Governed
- Maintained
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Most SharePoint environments contain:
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- Poor metadata
- Inconsistent titles
- Duplicate terminology
- Mixed file standards
- No taxonomy strategy
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So users search for:
“VPN process”
And receive:
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- 47 documents
- 12 outdated procedures
- 6 duplicates
- 3 archived versions
- 1 incomplete draft
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At that point, people stop searching and start asking colleagues instead.
Tribal knowledge replaces controlled information.
SharePoint often mirrors organisational dysfunction
One uncomfortable truth:
Poor SharePoint environments usually reflect a poor organisational information culture.
Common symptoms include:
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- Departments protecting silos
- No governance authority
- No content standards
- No review ownership
- No retention discipline
- No metadata strategy
- No information architecture
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The technology exposes the underlying disorder.
Projects Flood SharePoint with Dead Content
Large IT and engineering projects generate enormous amounts of:
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- Drafts
- Working papers
- Design discussions
- Meeting outputs
- Temporary deliverables
- Review copies
- Migration files
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Much of this content has only short-term value.
But organisations rarely clean up after projects end.
So SharePoint accumulates digital sediment year after year.
Nobody archives because:
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- They fear deleting something important
- Ownership disappeared after restructuring
- Contractors left
- Teams changed
- Governance was never defined
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The result is institutional hoarding.
Permissions Create Invisible Chaos
Another major issue:
Overcomplicated permissions.
Many SharePoint environments evolve into:
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- Broken inheritance structures
- Conflicting access rights
- Locked-down libraries nobody can use
- Open libraries nobody should access
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Eventually, users bypass governance by:
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- Saving files locally
- Emailing attachments
- Creating unofficial repositories
- Using Teams chats as storage
- Maintaining shadow systems
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The platform fragments further.
AI May Make the Problem Worse
AI search and summarisation tools sound attractive.
But AI trained against unmanaged repositories can amplify confusion:
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- Surfacing obsolete content
- Repeating inaccurate procedures
- Mixing draft and approved information
- Generating false confidence in poor data
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AI cannot distinguish:
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- Operationally valid content
- Regulatory accuracy
- Controlled documentation
- Organisational truth
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Information architecture scaled through AI becomes faster misinformation.
SharePoint works well — When information is managed
Well-run SharePoint environments can work, but require:
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- Governance
- Taxonomy
- Ownership
- Review cycles
- Metadata discipline
- Archiving policies
- Information architecture
- Content lifecycle management
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Most importantly:
They require organisations to treat information as an operational asset — not digital clutter.
Because without governance, SharePoint does not become a knowledge hub.
It becomes a corporate attic full of forgotten documents nobody trusts.
Organisations need to step up, invest in training, and employ an information manager.