“We know the file is somewhere. We just can’t find it.”
That sentence probably costs organizations more money than anyone realizes.
An employee spends ten minutes looking for a document. Then they ask a coworker. That person finds a copy, but nobody is sure whether it’s the current one. Someone remembers that an updated version was emailed around a few months ago, while another employee thinks it was moved into Teams.
Eventually, they find it.
Problem solved?
Not really.
You just had two or three people stop doing their actual jobs to find one document.
For a NonProfit with 20, 50, 100, or 150 employees, those little interruptions add up. And when staff is already stretched thin, spending time searching for information your organization already has is a frustrating way to burn capacity.
Microsoft 365 gives organizations several places to work with files, particularly Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
The problem is that they overlap enough to make the answer to a simple question surprisingly unclear:
Where should our employees actually save things?
There’s a relatively simple way to think about it:
OneDrive is primarily for your files. SharePoint is primarily for the organization’s files. Teams is where people work together—and many of the files you access through Teams are actually stored in SharePoint.
Your employees don’t need to understand all the technology behind that.
They need to know where to put something today so another employee can find it two years from now.
That’s the outcome that matters.
Why Are Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive So Confusing?
Because Microsoft allows you to do many of the same things in all three.
You can create documents.
You can share documents.
You can collaborate with coworkers.
You can open the same Word or Excel files.
So, from the average employee’s perspective, the obvious question is:
What’s the difference?
That’s when people develop their own systems.
Finance does it one way.
Programs does it another.
Someone loves Teams.
Someone else puts everything in OneDrive.
Another employee still emails attachments because that’s what they’ve always done.
For a smaller organization, that can work surprisingly well for a while because everybody knows everybody.
Then the NonProfit grows.
More employees come onboard. Departments get larger. People work remotely. New programs are added. Employees leave. Responsibilities change.
The informal system that worked with 15 people starts creating friction at 50.
That’s why file storage isn’t really about where Microsoft lets you save a document.
It’s about ownership.
Who does the information belong to?
OneDrive: Think Individual Work
Suppose a program director is preparing next year’s budget.
She’s still working through the numbers. It’s not finished. She has notes, a couple of different scenarios, and a spreadsheet she’s changing every day.
OneDrive is a perfectly reasonable place to work on it.
It’s her working document.
But eventually that budget gets approved.
Now it’s no longer just her working file. It’s part of the organization’s financial and program history.
That changes where it should probably live.
A useful test is:
If this employee left tomorrow, would the organization still need this information?
If the answer is yes, think carefully before making that employee’s OneDrive the permanent home.
Personal notes from a conference? OneDrive may make perfect sense.
A rough draft you’re still developing? Same thing.
The approved employee handbook?
Your final program budget?
Board materials?
Organizational procedures?
Those aren’t really an employee’s files.
They belong to the NonProfit.
SharePoint: Think Organizational Information
This is where SharePoint starts making more sense.
Policies, procedures, templates, department documents, program information, board materials, grant-related documents, marketing resources, finance documents, HR information and operational resources all need to remain available regardless of which employee originally created them.
Think about the difference between:
“Where did Sarah save that?”
and:
“That belongs in the Finance area.”
The second approach scales much better.
A well-designed SharePoint environment gives organizational information a home based on how the NonProfit actually operates.
Leadership has an appropriate area.
Finance has one.
Programs have one.
Development has one.
HR has one with the appropriate restrictions.
The structure will be different for every organization, and it should be. Technology should support how the organization operates rather than forcing the organization into an unnecessarily complicated structure.
There’s a caution here, though.
Moving everything into SharePoint doesn’t automatically fix anything.
If you recreate 15 years of confusing folders inside SharePoint, you now have the same problem with newer software.
The goal isn’t to create more places to put information.
The goal is to make the answer to “Where would I look for this?” reasonably obvious.
Teams: Think Collaboration
Teams creates another layer of confusion because it looks like its own file-storage system.
For employees, that’s understandable.
They’re having a conversation in Teams, someone uploads a document, everybody starts working on it, and there it is under Files.
Behind the scenes, files shared in Teams channels are generally stored in SharePoint.
The employee doesn’t necessarily need to know that.
What they need to understand is what the Team is for.
Maybe you have a Team for leadership.
Another for a department.
Another for a specific program or long-term project.
Employees can have conversations, meet, share information and collaborate around the work in one place.
That can work extremely well.
Until everyone gets permission to create whatever they want.
Then you get:
Leadership.
Leadership Team.
Management.
Senior Management.
Management 2025.
Leadership NEW.
Now technology has made it incredibly easy to collaborate, but nobody knows which collaboration space is the right one.
Again, the problem isn’t really Teams.
It’s a lack of ownership and structure.
The Employee Who Created the File Shouldn’t Determine Its Future
Here’s a scenario worth thinking about.
A longtime employee has worked at your NonProfit for eight years.
During that time, she has created hundreds of useful documents. She has spreadsheets, templates, reports, procedures and historical information that other people occasionally need.
Then she leaves.
Only after she’s gone does everyone realize how much organizational information lived inside her personal way of working.
Now someone has to determine what needs to be kept, what can be deleted, who needs access and where everything should go.
That’s the wrong time to make those decisions.
Employee turnover is inevitable.
Good information management assumes it will happen.
Organizational information should have a useful life that isn’t dependent on the employment life of the person who created it.
That’s one of the strongest reasons to have a clear distinction between individual working files and organizational files.
“We Already Have Files Everywhere. Now What?”
This is usually where the conversation gets uncomfortable.
Because you may already have ten years of files.
Some are on a server.
Some are in SharePoint.
Some are in OneDrive.
Some are in Teams.
Some are sitting on employee computers.
Some are attached to emails.
And somewhere there’s probably a Dropbox or Google Drive account created for a project six years ago that everyone forgot about.
The instinct may be to say:
“We need to clean all of this up.”
Eventually, yes.
But don’t start there.
Start with what happens tomorrow.
Where should Finance save a new organizational document tomorrow?
Where should a program manager save one?
Where do HR documents belong?
Where should an employee work on an early draft?
How should teams collaborate?
What information needs restricted access?
What should happen when someone leaves?
Decide how you want the organization to work going forward.
Then tackle the historical information based on what’s worth keeping, what needs to move and what can reasonably be retired.
Otherwise, you risk spending a tremendous amount of staff time reorganizing old information without fixing the behaviors that created the problem.
You’ll have a beautifully organized mess that starts becoming disorganized again the next day.
Before Buying Something Else, Use What You Already Have
When employees struggle to find information, it’s tempting to look for another solution.
Maybe there’s a better document-management application.
Maybe there’s a new collaboration platform.
Maybe some AI tool will organize everything.
Sometimes another tool really is necessary.
But many NonProfits already own a very capable platform in Microsoft 365.
The first question should be whether you’re getting the value from the technology you already pay for.
If the organization has OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams but nobody has established when or how employees should use them, adding another application may simply create a fourth place to look.
Now the employee searches SharePoint.
Then Teams.
Then OneDrive.
Then the new system.
More technology doesn’t automatically create more efficiency.
Sometimes the better investment is making the existing technology easier to use.
File Confusion Is a Payroll Problem
This is the part that’s easy to underestimate.
Let’s say an employee loses ten minutes trying to find a document.
That’s not much.
But then another employee gets interrupted to help.
Maybe they both spend another five minutes figuring out which version is current.
Then somebody needs permission to open it.
You’ve turned one missing document into 20 or 30 minutes of payroll.
Do that repeatedly across an organization and the numbers start getting interesting.
Even ten minutes per day across 50 employees represents more than eight hours of staff capacity.
Not every employee will lose ten minutes every day, of course.
That isn’t the point.
The point is that small technology frustrations have a cost.
They just don’t usually arrive as an invoice.
They arrive as interruptions.
A few minutes here.
Another ten there.
A coworker pulled away from something else.
A meeting delayed because nobody has the current version.
That’s why good information management is about more than keeping things neat.
It helps people stay productive.
Being Able to Find a File Is Only Half the Job
The other half is making sure the right people can access it.
Not everyone needs access to everything.
Finance needs information other employees shouldn’t see.
HR may require tighter controls.
Program teams need access to the information required to do their jobs.
Leadership may have its own materials.
The difficulty is that permissions tend to accumulate.
An employee moves from one department to another but keeps the old access.
Someone gets temporary access to a project and keeps it for three years.
A manager shares a folder directly because it solves an immediate problem.
Nobody intended to create a messy permissions environment.
It happened one reasonable decision at a time.
Then somebody eventually asks:
“Who can see this?”
And the answer takes three people and an afternoon to figure out.
That’s a problem.
A useful Microsoft 365 environment needs both sides of the equation:
People should be able to find what they need, and only the right people should be able to access it.
Your Employees Shouldn’t Need a Microsoft Certification to Save a File
This is where organizations can overcomplicate things.
Your employees have jobs to do.
A program manager shouldn’t need to understand the architecture behind SharePoint and Teams.
Finance shouldn’t need to know how Microsoft connects every service behind the scenes.
Employees need a few understandable rules.
My working files go here.
Our department’s files go there.
This is where our team collaborates.
Sensitive information belongs in the appropriate restricted location.
These are the places where I can find organization-wide resources.
That’s enough.
When people have to stop and think about the technology every time they save something, the system probably needs work.
Good technology should eventually become pretty boring.
People know what to do, information is where they expect it to be, and everyone gets back to work.
What Should Our NonProfit Do First?
Don’t start by moving files.
Start by asking questions.
Get a few people from different parts of the organization together.
Ask Finance where they save things.
Ask Operations.
Ask Programs.
Ask Leadership.
And make sure you ask someone who joined relatively recently.
Longtime employees often know where information is because they’ve learned the organization’s unwritten rules.
New employees are a much better test of whether the system actually makes sense.
Choose a few common documents and ask:
“If you needed this right now, where would you look?”
If five people give you five different answers, you’ve learned something useful.
Then establish a simple framework for OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams.
Keep it understandable.
Document it.
Train people on it.
And perhaps most importantly, make sure somebody owns it.
Because without ownership, even a well-designed environment will slowly drift back toward whatever is easiest for each employee in the moment.
Your NonProfit Probably Doesn’t Need Another Place to Save Files
You need fewer questions about where your existing files belong.
That’s a different problem.
The objective isn’t for your employees to become experts in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive.
The objective is for an employee to sit down, find the information they need, collaborate with the right people and get back to the job your NonProfit hired them to do.
At I-M Technology, that’s how we look at Microsoft 365.
The technology itself is only part of the equation.
It needs to be configured and organized around the people who actually use it, with appropriate permissions, clear ownership and a structure that can continue working as the organization grows.
Our Cloud Services for NonProfits include Microsoft 365 solutions, migrations and cloud environments designed to help employees work securely from wherever they need to be.
If your staff is spending too much time trying to figure out where files live, which copy is current, or who should have access, you don’t need to diagnose the Microsoft 365 problem before reaching out.
Tell us what isn’t working.
We can start there.
