Few narratives in Microsoft 365 have done more damage than this one.

Teams replaced SharePoint.

I have heard it from executives, admins, and users alike. It sounds plausible, especially when Teams is the place people live all day. But it is wrong, and the confusion it creates is entirely understandable.

Teams did not replace SharePoint. It arrived suddenly, at exactly the moment the world needed it.

Many of us remember that Friday. The one where people were told to bring their laptops home for the weekend because offices were closing. Teams went from an interesting option to essential infrastructure almost overnight. Skype faded out, meetings moved online, chat replaced hallway conversations, and for many of us, including me, the office never really came back.

In that moment, Teams did what SharePoint had done before it. It showed up. And just like SharePoint, Teams has been rebuilt more than once since then. New clients. New architectures. Performance fixes. Feature resets. Each iteration made it more central to how work actually happens.

Today, Teams is arguably the most important communication and collaboration tool in Microsoft 365.

And it is still powered by none other than SharePoint.

This is where the misunderstanding begins. Users experience Teams as the interface. SharePoint fades into the background. Visibility turns into attribution. If people do not see SharePoint, they assume it no longer matters.

But every Team is backed by a SharePoint site. Every file lives in a document library. Every permission, retention rule, and governance decision still applies. This ties directly back to something I covered earlier in the series in Day 3, SharePoint is a document library platform first. The storage model never changed. Only the front door did.

In many organizations, especially those that are document-heavy, Teams became the preferred surface for departmental collaboration. Not because SharePoint was inadequate, but because Teams made those document libraries easier to reach, easier to discuss, and easier to live in day to day.

That shift was amplified by Teams’ mobile-first push. While SharePoint struggled for years to find its footing on mobile devices, Teams doubled down on making files, conversations, and meetings accessible from anywhere. When people could review documents, comment, and collaborate from their phones, the choice of interface stopped being theoretical.

This also helps explain why traditional SharePoint homepages struggled. Teams effectively replaced them for many users, not because pages were broken, but because they were no longer the fastest way to get to work. I explored this dynamic in Day 8, Most SharePoint homepages fail before users even scroll.

Microsoft eventually acknowledged this reality and responded with Viva Connections. It was a deliberate attempt to bring SharePoint pages and intranet experiences back into Teams, not as a replacement, but as a reattachment. The message was subtle but clear. Teams is the hub, but SharePoint still owns the content.

Pretending these tools are separate leads to real problems. Users do not know where files actually live. Owners do not understand what they are responsible for. Admins are left cleaning up messes that started with incomplete explanations.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in my single biggest pet peeve: the “Shared Documents” folder.

For years, we told people folders were bad. Then Teams showed up and quietly created one folder per channel inside the same document library, all under “Shared Documents,” which in the URL becomes the delightful “Shared%20Documents.” Suddenly, everything we warned against was back, just automated.

And yes, that made things worse.

I wrote about this contradiction in Day 4, SharePoint folders were never the problem. Folders were never the enemy. Poor structure and poor explanations were. Teams did not break that rule. It simply made the consequences more visible.

Channel management did not help. Renaming a Teams channel is still more complicated than it should be, especially when that name is tied directly to folder names and URLs in SharePoint. What looks like a cosmetic change in Teams often has real downstream impact.

This is not a failure of Teams or SharePoint. It is a failure of how we explain the ecosystem.

Teams is the interface. SharePoint is the foundation. One did not replace the other.

Tools do not compete. Narratives do.

When we stop framing Microsoft 365 as a battle between products and start explaining how they work together, things begin to make sense. And SharePoint finally gets treated not as something that was replaced, but as the thing that made all of this possible in the first place.

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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.