SharePoint: A Powerful Platform That’s Expensive to Maintain

For many IT professionals, SharePoint is both a vital collaboration tool and a never-ending maintenance challenge. While SharePoint is designed to centralize knowledge and streamline workflows, the reality is that keeping it functional, secure, and valuable to end users requires significant investment—both in money and IT resources.

From storage costs and performance tuning to governance and user adoption, managing SharePoint can quickly become a financial and operational burden.

The True Cost of Managing SharePoint

If your organization relies heavily on SharePoint, you’ve likely encountered these hidden costs:

• Storage and Licensing Costs: As data grows, so do SharePoint storage costs, particularly with Microsoft’s premium storage pricing.
• Search Inefficiencies: Built-in search is limited, leading to wasted time and reduced productivity as employees struggle to find information.
• Customization and Development: Many organizations invest heavily in custom SharePoint development to make it work for their needs.
• User Training and Adoption: Without proper training, SharePoint remains underutilized, forcing IT to spend more time on support.
• Security and Compliance: Ensuring proper permissions, compliance with regulations, and preventing data leaks adds another layer of ongoing management.

Optimizing SharePoint for Cost and Efficiency

Rather than continuously sinking resources into SharePoint without seeing improvements, IT teams can optimize their SharePoint workflows to reduce costs and maximize value. Here are some key strategies:

1. Supercharge SharePoint Search with Unleash

One of the biggest challenges with SharePoint is search. Employees waste time looking for documents they know exist but can’t find. This leads to lost productivity and frustration, forcing IT to field repeated support requests about missing files and broken search functionality.

Unleash solves this by providing AI-powered enterprise search that deeply integrates with SharePoint.

• Indexes content more effectively using Microsoft Graph and SharePoint APIs.
• Respects SharePoint security permissions while delivering better, more contextual results.
• Unifies knowledge across SharePoint and other platforms like Slack, Confluence, and Google Drive.
• Reduces IT support burden by making it easier for employees to find what they need, without manual intervention.

With Unleash, IT teams can eliminate the inefficiencies of SharePoint’s built-in search while also reducing the need for costly custom search solutions.

2. Automate Governance and Compliance

Many IT teams spend an excessive amount of time managing governance policies manually. Implementing automated governance tools can help enforce policies, ensure compliance, and reduce security risks without constant IT intervention.

• Use Microsoft Purview for compliance monitoring and automated data retention policies.
• Leverage Power Automate to create workflows that enforce permissions, flag policy violations, and automate document lifecycle management.

3. Optimize Storage Costs

Instead of paying high SharePoint storage fees, IT teams can reduce costs by:

• Implementing lifecycle policies that automatically archive or delete old, unused files.
• Using OneDrive or Azure Blob Storage for files that don’t require frequent collaboration.
• Compressing and deduplicating data to minimize storage costs.

4. Improve User Adoption with Targeted Training

A major reason why SharePoint feels expensive is low user adoption. If employees aren’t using it effectively, the ROI diminishes. Instead of generic training, consider:

• Role-based training that focuses on how specific teams should use SharePoint.
• Interactive learning tools like Microsoft’s Learning Pathways to provide self-paced learning.
• Providing AI-powered assistants (like Unleash) to help users navigate SharePoint more efficiently.

Final Thoughts: Make SharePoint Work for You, Not Against You

SharePoint is a valuable tool, but its costs—both in terms of money and IT effort—can spiral out of control if not optimized. By enhancing search with Unleash, automating governance, reducing storage costs, and driving better user adoption, IT professionals can ensure that SharePoint remains an asset, not a liability.

Ready to see how Unleash can optimize your SharePoint experience? Get started today.

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