A Note From The Author

I want to take a moment to explain why I decided to create A Non-Technical Guide to SharePoint and give you a sense of the perspective it's written from. I have a Bachelor's degree in Economics and most of my professional experience has been focused on business operations, management and accounting. Those of us in these kinds of roles aren't formally trained in technology, but as our responsibilities evolve we become familiar with a wide range of systems and processes, many of which are deeply rooted in it. My own comfort with technology developed in a similar way: through my professional career, personal interest and my husband, who works in software development. I don't consider myself a tech expert, yet I've developed a genuine and practical understanding of the digital world and a strong desire to keep learning as it changes. That combination of operations experience, business context and a self-taught but capable relationship with technology is exactly the perspective I'm writing from. 

Document management has always been a challenge for growing businesses, but COVID made it impossible to ignore. Prior to the pandemic, most organizations managed the limitations of their systems without too much difficulty. Teams found workarounds, tolerated the inefficiencies and kept moving because disrupting an imperfect system felt harder than living with it. Then, without warning, everything changed. When staff members were suddenly working from different locations, accessing files remotely was difficult or sometimes impossible, and the informal ways we had always shared information were no longer an option. The systems that had been quietly tolerated for years became the very things slowing businesses down. What COVID exposed was not just a need for remote access, but a need for better structure.

What followed for me was a long period of research and experimentation. There was no shortage of SharePoint resources available, but most of them explained individual features and were written for people with an IT background. None of them explained how to design a SharePoint document management system to fit the needs of a small organization, in language that a non-technical person could understand.  

Office managers, business owners and operations professionals face this challenge every day: they know their current system isn't working but they don't know where to start or how to move forward without disrupting the business in the process. What was needed was a document management solution that was practical enough to implement without IT support, affordable enough for a small business, and designed around how those businesses operate day to day; not how a software vendor assumed they should. That gap is what this guide was built to fill.

If that sounds like exactly what you've been looking for, you're in the right place.