If you want to collaborate with your team members and the content belongs to the organization – it belongs in SharePoint. Should you be storing documents in SharePoint or OneDrive? The answer is pretty straightforward and simple: So back to the original question of this article. Obviously, if you need to access non-document information like news, events, links, lists, etc., you will need to switch to the SharePoint sites themselves.

So, in theory, you could “live” in OneDrive and make it your main hub for document access within the whole organization. Essentially what this does – it rolls up the document libraries from all the SharePoint sites you have access to and presents them all for your convenience in one place ( they don’t call it OneDrive for nothing) 😊Įxample of being able to access SharePoint Document Libraries from OneDrive for Business You will see the list of some of these document libraries on the left-hand side under Quick Access. One unique capability of OneDrive is the ability to access other document libraries stored on various SharePoint sites. OneDrive allows access to SharePoint document libraries. I documented the instructions in this article. If you are a SharePoint or Microsoft 365 Global Administrator – Mazel Tov! You have the superpowers to access anyone’s OneDrive. Access by the SharePoint/Global Microsoft 365 Administrator.Just like in SharePoint, you can right-click on any file or folder and copy or share the link with the users internally and externally. There are only two conditions under which content (files and folders) from the OneDrive account will be accessed by others: By default – everything you store within OneDrive is private and personal to you – the OneDrive Owner. Since documents are all you can store in OneDrive, think of it as the user’s personal document library. That’s all you can store there.Įxample of User’s OneDrive OneDrive is the user’s “personal document library.” OneDrive is just about files and folders. Unlike SharePoint, where you can store documents, lists, links, pages, etc. OneDrive does not have the complexity of SharePoint. Every licensed user within Microsoft 365 has their own OneDrive account, tied to their User ID. So what is OneDrive? OneDrive or OneDrive for Business essentially is users’ personal repository in the cloud. So shortly after Microsoft took SharePoint to the cloud in 2011 by making it part of an Office 365 ecosystem, a new application appeared on the horizon – something called OneDrive. Site Owners and Site Collection Administrators always had “superpowers” and could access the “hidden” content.Įxample of Site Permissions showing Site Owners and Site Collection Admins who always have access to “hidden” content Multiple team members would access any given SharePoint site, and even breaking inheritance at a folder level would not make sense. So this was great when you needed to share and collaborate on the documents and other content with your team members, but in cases where users had to store documents in a private manner – there was really no place or refuge from it.

What is OneDrive?Īs mentioned above, SharePoint existed for quite some time as a team collaboration tool. To read more about SharePoint history, evolution, and use cases, please check out this article as well.

So any given SharePoint site in SharePoint was typically accessed by a number of users/employees (team members).Įxample of Document Management Capabilities available in SharePointĮxample of SharePoint Site Permissions (where multiple team members have access to the same site) Besides being the one-stop shop for any content within the organization, it is important to note that it was created as a team collaboration platform. Of course, SharePoint also stores other content like lists, calendars, and tasks, but these were the primary use cases.

Historically it was used by organizations for two primary use cases: Intranet Portals and Document Management. We have had SharePoint since 2001, so for more than 20 years now. Links to OneDrive and SharePoint applications from Microsoft 365 App Launcherįrom the historical perspective, it makes sense to start with SharePoint. So today, I would like to clarify once and for all the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive. Although they happen to be capable of doing similar things when it comes to document management, the two are fundamentally different and exist for different reasons within Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Though I originally published the article comparing SharePoint and OneDrive back in 2015, I still get a lot of inquiries from my loyal followers and confusion about the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive.

Onedrive vs sharepoint