The biggest lie we ever told users about SharePoint was simple and well intentioned.

“It’s easy.”

We said it to calm people down. We said it to reduce resistance. We said it because we were tired of explaining things and wanted buy in before the first training session even started.

And it backfired.

When reality didn’t match the promise, frustration followed. Some people didn’t just struggle with SharePoint, they decided it flat out sucked. Fair or not, that perception stuck with some.

I took that personally. I launched this blog and spent years working with teams, tenants, and real users to prove there was more to SharePoint than bad implementations and broken expectations. Not by pretending it was easy, but by showing how it actually works when you respect its complexity instead of hiding it.

The moment you tell someone something is easy, you create an expectation. When that expectation is not met, trust erodes immediately. Not later. Not gradually. Immediately.

In the early years, I heard the same request over and over again:

“Can you make it not look like SharePoint?”

That question was never really about design. It was about discomfort. People associated the SharePoint look with something they were told would be easy but did not feel that way once they started using it. So the instinct was to hide it instead of learning it.

I have also seen the other side of the lie play out in training rooms. I have watched people fall asleep during SharePoint training sessions. Not because they were lazy or uninterested, but because the session was built on the wrong premise. We promised easy and then delivered structure, governance, and rules.

Governance is not sexy. It does not sell. But pretending it does not exist only makes it worse when people finally run into it. Microsoft has been clear for years that governance is foundational to a healthy tenant, even if it rarely shows up in demos.

SharePoint was never hard in the way a developer tool is hard. But it was never easy either. It requires decisions. Structure. Naming. Discipline. It asks users to think differently about files, ownership, and collaboration.

Another symptom of the same lie showed up in tickets. I lost count of how many requests I got from site owners asking IT to give someone permissions. Over and over again.

Instead of empowering people to manage their own spaces, we often positioned SharePoint as something only IT could safely touch. That reinforced the idea that it was fragile, complicated, and best left alone. Even Microsoft’s own guidance assumes site owners understand permissions and ownership.

My approach has always been the opposite. Teach people how to fish.

The more knowledge you share, the stronger the organization becomes. When people understand how permissions work, how libraries behave, and how ownership actually functions, SharePoint stops being scary. It becomes predictable.

When users opened SharePoint and felt lost after being promised “easy,” they did not think, maybe I need time to learn this. They thought, something is wrong with me. Or worse, IT lied.

I have seen this play out for years. Adoption initiatives that stall before launch. Feedback that sounds like frustration but is really disappointment. Microsoft talks a lot about adoption being a journey, not a moment, but that message sometimes gets lost in rollout pressure.

None of that is caused by SharePoint itself. It is caused by the gap between the promise and the reality.

The truth is simpler and more honest.

SharePoint is not easy. It is worth it.

When you set that expectation instead, everything changes. Users become more patient. Training becomes a conversation instead of damage control. Governance becomes a known constraint instead of a surprise.

This applies far beyond SharePoint. We do the same thing with Teams, with Copilot, with every new tool we roll out. We oversell ease instead of explaining value. Then we act surprised when adoption struggles.

If I could redo every SharePoint rollout I have ever been part of, I would change one sentence.

I would stop saying “this is easy” and start saying “this will take a little time, and it will make your work better if we do it right.”

Users can handle honesty. They cannot handle broken promises.

If you have ever been told a tool would be easy and felt gaslit five minutes later, you are not alone. And if there is another lie we tell ourselves or our users about SharePoint, say it out loud in the comments.

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This post is part of my 25 days of SharePoint series, created to celebrate SharePoint’s 25th anniversary and lead up to the SharePoint at 25 digital event on March 2.

Each post reflects on what actually made SharePoint last 25 years, the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons learned from building, breaking, and rebuilding it in real organizations.

You can find all posts in this series here.

If there’s a topic you think I should cover next, a SharePoint mistake you keep seeing, or a question no one ever answers straight, leave a comment. This series is shaped by real experiences, not marketing slides.