What Is SharePoint?

SharePoint is Microsoft's browser-based platform for storing files, organizing structured data, and publishing intranet pages, and it ships as part of the Microsoft 365 subscription alongside Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive. Every file you upload and every list row you create lives in an underlying SQL-based content database that SharePoint manages for you, so users interact only through the web interface, the SharePoint mobile app, or the REST and Graph APIs, never touching the database directly.

Everything in SharePoint is organized around sites, which act as the top-level container for a team, project, or department. Inside a site you create document libraries to hold files and lists to hold structured, tabular data, and both libraries and lists support custom columns, views, and metadata so you can filter and sort content the way a spreadsheet would, but with permission controls and version history built in.

A document library stores actual files — Word docs, PDFs, spreadsheets — and automatically tracks version history, check-in/check-out status, and custom metadata columns like 'Department' or 'Status' that you can add without touching a database schema. A list, by contrast, holds no files by default; it behaves like a lightweight, web-based table with typed columns (text, choice, person, date, lookup) and is commonly used for trackers such as issue logs, employee directories, or approval queues.

In practice, organizations use SharePoint for three overlapping purposes: team collaboration sites where a project group stores working documents, communication sites that function as a polished intranet homepage or news portal, and structured business processes such as leave-request or purchase-approval workflows built with Power Automate on top of SharePoint lists. A single tenant typically contains hundreds of sites, each with its own permissions, so governance and naming conventions matter as usage scales.