Do your colleagues download everything locally? The problem is not with them, but with Sharepoint.
SharePoint contains all your documents. No one is looking for anything.
Your teams have migrated to SharePoint, management has signed the purchase orders, the “digital transformation” project is checked off. And every morning, the same files reappear on local desktops, renamed _v2_FINAL_corrigé. It’s not a problem of training. It’s a problem of trust, and it has a specific cause.
What’s really going on in your teams
A user is looking for a contract. He types a keyword into SharePoint, gets 40 results, none of which match, and gives up in 20 seconds. He opens Windows Explorer, finds his local copy from last year, and goes back to work. No one had forbidden him anything. He’s just learned that the system doesn’t work for him.
As a result, fifteen versions of the same document circulate in parallel. Decisions are made on the basis of out-of-date files. And half of the company’s documentary heritage lives on laptops that take the train, connect to unknown Wi-Fi networks, and sometimes end up in a cab.
This behavior is often interpreted as resistance to change. This is rarely the right diagnosis.
It’s a silent admission: the search tool is so unreliable that people prefer to manage their own copy rather than trust the system.
Here’s the bottom line: many SharePoint deployments are botched. The migration was done quickly, with the legacy network structure glued-copied into the cloud. The result looks like a 200,000-document tote box with no signposting.
Concrete causes, one by one
Research that fails to deliver
SharePoint Search works well when documents are consistently named, stored in structured libraries, and enriched with metadata.
In practice, tree structures are inherited from the old file server, with no unified logic. The search engine can’t compensate for a disorganized structure. Users know this, they’ve tested it. They don’t test again.
Two generations of workers, two relationships to documentary space
Employees who have grown up with a tree file server know exactly where to store a document and where to find it again, as long as the folder hierarchy is logical. SharePoint’s web interface confuses them: it’s slow to load, access rights are opaque, and right-click behavior isn’t what they’re used to.
More recent collaborators, on the other hand, search in full text without worrying about location, provided the search is reliable. These two ways of working coexist in the same teams without ever being named, let alone reconciled.
SharePoint and OneDrive: a confusion that nobody is solving
Many users don’t distinguish between the two tools. SharePoint is a shared collaboration space for team members. OneDrive is each user’s individual storage. Both are part of Microsoft 365 and can synchronize locally, which creates exactly the disaster scenario described by an IT manager in the comments of a viral LinkedIn post on the subject: document stored on SharePoint, copy on OneDrive, sent as an email attachment to colleagues. Three locations, zero reference versions.
Lack of governance during deployment
When each team creates its own Teams space or SharePoint library with no common rules, the platform becomes unmanageable in a matter of months. A multi-gigabyte “To be sorted” folder, abandoned sites, hastily assigned access rights that are never reviewed. The CIO suffers from rising storage costs without any improvement in service.
What it costs, beyond the mess
The consequences are not just organizational.
- Decisions made on the wrong versions. When nobody knows which copy is the right one, meetings start with ten minutes of comparing files.
- Data out of IT control. Files on local workstations are not backed up in any structured way, are not encrypted, and are not traceable in the event of an incident.
- Documents that feed consumer AI tools. When an employee works on his local copy, he can drag it into ChatGPT or an online tool without the company being informed or having any say in the confidentiality of the data.
- A loss of corporate memory. When an employee leaves, his local files go with him. Accumulated strategic knowledge (procedures, contacts, negotiation histories) disappears overnight.
- nLPD obligations not met. Storing personal data on unsupervised workstations has exposed companies to real risks since the Swiss Data Protection Act came into force in September 2023.
How can we restore confidence in concrete terms?
The solution isn’t to block downloads or get people to sign a digital charter. It’s to make SharePoint better than the local office, which requires upstream work, not just communication.
Audit before you migrate
A SharePoint migration that copies what already exists reproduces chaos in the cloud. Before moving anything, you need to decide which documents are active, which can be archived, and which library structure matches your teams’ actual workflows. This work takes time. It’s the only thing that determines whether the search will be usable in six months’ time.
Set simple rules decided by management, not IT
Not a 50-page manual. Four decisions are enough: who can create a Teams space, how to name a document, how to mark a final version, how long to keep an inactive file. These rules have to come from top management, not from the IT department. When they come from IT, they are perceived as technical constraints. When they come from management, they become operating standards.
Making search visible and reliable
Adding metadata to SharePoint libraries – document owner, status (draft/validated/archived), revision date – changes the search experience in measurable ways. Making these columns visible in the default view is often enough.
An initial case study shared in a team meeting, such as “Here’s how I found this contract in 8 seconds”, does more than any generic training course.
Set up OneDrive synchronization correctly
Synchronizing SharePoint libraries via the OneDrive client lets you work offline while keeping files in the cloud. It’s the perfect compromise for teams who need fast access without a permanent connection. However, synchronization must be configured by IT, and not left to individual initiative, otherwise you end up with exactly the same scenario of multiple copies as described above.
Train teams on their real space, not on a demo
A one-hour workshop on the team’s SharePoint is worth ten generic sessions on “Microsoft 365 functionalities”. The objective is precise: each participant leaves having found a document via search, co-edited a file without saving it locally, and understood why OneDrive and SharePoint are not the same thing.
Safety: a subject underestimated by SMEs
Centralizing documents solves one organizational problem. It creates another if the platform isn’t secure.
Microsoft manages the availability of SharePoint infrastructure. It does not manage your teams’ access rights, delete malicious files dropped by mistake, or automatically restore your data in the event of ransomware or mass deletion. The SharePoint Recycle Bin stores files for 93 days. After that, they are lost without external backup.
A Microsoft-independent cloud-to-cloud backup isn’t a duplicate: it’s the only guarantee that your data is recoverable if something goes wrong with your Microsoft 365 tenant.
This is not an IT project. It’s a management decision.
Document governance systematically fails when it is the sole responsibility of the IT department. IT can deploy, configure and train. It cannot decide that “every living document must be in SharePoint”. This rule has to come from top management, just like the rules for validating an expense or external communication. 
As long as managers download their own copies “to go faster”, teams do the same. It’s as simple as that.
The day an employee finds what he needs in less than ten seconds via SharePoint, he stops downloading. Not because they’ve been asked. Because it works.
What we do at Infologo
We support SMEs in French-speaking Switzerland in structuring their Microsoft 365 environment: document audit, SharePoint configuration, access rights, team training, cloud-to-cloud backup with Acronis Cyber Protect. If your SharePoint looks anything like what you’ve just read, we can talk.
Frequently asked questions
