Microsoft Teams was designed for projects.

You know , things that begin, have a clear purpose, and at some point end. Discrete pieces of work. Finite timelines. A team that forms, delivers, and disperses.

Somewhere along the way, it became the default space for everything.

Teams for departments. Teams for sub-teams. Teams for the away-day planning committee. Teams for people who once had a good meeting. Teams for the group that formed in lockdown and technically still exists, although nobody’s quite sure why.

The result?

Knowledge scattered across hundreds of little fortresses.

Each with its own channels. Its own files. Its own conversations that happened in private chats because the channel felt too public.

If you’re a member? You can probably find things. If you’re not a member? You don’t even know the information exists , let alone where it is. And half the time, the person who is a member can’t find it either, because Teams was never designed to be a document management system.

We replaced the one messy shared drive with a hundred locked rooms.

I’ve seen both extremes

I’ve worked across two very different government departments , and the contrast was striking.

One had strict controls. I needed special permission just to pilot a project in Teams. Infuriating at the time. But at least there was a single, findable version of everything.

The other had gone the opposite direction. Full autonomy. Everyone free to set up whatever they liked. The result was a labyrinth. Nobody knew what existed. Nobody knew what they were missing. And nobody had the authority , or the appetite , to sort it out.

The second felt more modern. It was actually more chaotic.

Here’s what actually happens

Teams is great for conversation. For real-time collaboration on a piece of work in progress. For the kind of dynamic back-and-forth that email handles badly.

It’s not so great for storage. For being the place where the authoritative version of something lives. For being findable by someone who wasn’t in the original thread.

The problem is that organisations deployed Teams without thinking about what it was actually for , and without maintaining (or building) a parallel home for documents and knowledge that needed to be reliably findable.

SharePoint, properly structured, is that home. Not a replacement for Teams , a complement to it. Teams for doing. SharePoint for knowing.

But “properly structured” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Most SharePoint environments aren’t. Which is how we end up back where we started , except now it’s worse, because the information is scattered across multiple platforms, most of which are members-only.

The irony of it all

We’ve been so focused on collaboration tools , how to work together in real time , that we’ve forgotten the other half of the equation: how to preserve what we know so that the next person can find it.

The Victorians had this problem too, in their way. Information lived with the people who happened to hold it. When those people left, the knowledge went with them.

We’ve built tools that are brilliant at connecting people. We haven’t always thought as carefully about connecting people to information.

That’s the gap. And it’s a fixable one.

Take the Team Scorecard to find out how your staff experience your organisation’s information environment.

Or get in touch , happy to talk about whether your Teams/SharePoint setup is working for you, or has quietly become the problem.

Jon Wellman is the founder of 3Clicks, helping organisations in the VCSE sector untangle their information environments so staff can find what they need , in three clicks or fewer.