Collaboration and files
SharePoint or a network drive: where do you keep your company files?
Short answer
SharePoint suits office documents that several people work on, also away from the office: you edit the same file at the same time and have version history. A network drive or NAS suits large files that must open fast locally, such as drawings, video and photos. Many companies do well to use both. If you only have Word, Excel and PDFs and are already in Microsoft 365, SharePoint is usually the better place.
What is the choice really about?
Not about technology, but about how you work. Three questions decide the answer.
- What kind of files are they? Quotes and spreadsheets of a few hundred kilobytes, or drawings and video of gigabytes.
- Where does the work happen? Everyone at the office, or also at home, at customers and on the road.
- Who looks after it? Is there someone who maintains a device in the meter cupboard.
How do they compare?
| Network drive or NAS at the office | SharePoint | |
|---|---|---|
| Working in one document at the same time | No, the second person gets “read-only” | Yes |
| Working away from the office | Through a VPN | Anywhere with a browser or the linked folder |
| Opening large files | Fast, they are in the building | Depends on your connection |
| Restoring versions | Only if it has been set up | Standard |
| Cost | Purchase, power and management | Included in the licence, extra storage costs money |
| Management | Yourself: updates, disks, backup | Microsoft runs the service, you do the set-up |
| Backup | Arrange it yourself | Arrange it yourself too |
The last row is often skipped. SharePoint has a recycle bin and versions, but that is not a backup. Why not is explained in is OneDrive a backup.
When do you choose SharePoint?
- You mostly work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF.
- People work at home or at customers, and the VPN is a source of complaints.
- Several people work on the same document, and there are versions going round with “final2” in the name.
- The server or NAS is due for replacement.
When do you stay with a drive at the office?
- You work with large files: CAD drawings, video, high-resolution photos.
- A program demands a drive letter or a database on a local disk. Some accounting and estimating packages do.
- The internet connection at the office is too tight to do everything through the cloud.
- The data may not leave the building or the country.
In the last case there is a third way: storage you can reach from anywhere, but that sits on Dutch hardware instead of at Microsoft. That is what JevanaFiles does.
Why is a combination often the answer?
Because most companies have both kinds of files. The accounts, quotes and HR go to SharePoint. The project archive with drawings stays on a NAS, which sends a copy off-site every night.
That is not a half choice. It is each kind of file in the place where it works best. What you avoid is the same file living in two places.
What goes wrong when moving to SharePoint?
The folder structure moves over one to one. Ten levels deep, with permissions per folder that nobody understands any more. SharePoint works better with a few libraries per team than with one tree for the whole company.
Everything is synced to every laptop. A hundred gigabytes on a laptop with a small disk. Set it so that files are only fetched when someone opens them.
Nobody clears out. Twenty years of files move across, including what could have gone long ago. A move is the moment to archive. What you must keep and for how long is covered in how long to keep business records.
Permissions are too wide. A shared link set to “anyone with the link” on the folder with salaries. Check who can reach what, especially before you switch on AI search that finds everything someone has rights to.
What do we do?
We first look at which files there are and how they are used, and then propose a structure. We do the move itself with a trial run. That falls under SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. If a NAS stays, we take it into management with a backup outside the building.