What Is SharePoint? A Guide to Its Use as a Knowledge Management Tool

SharePoint is Microsoft’s cloud-based collaboration and content management platform, built into the Microsoft 365 suite alongside Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive. Organizations already running Microsoft 365 often extend SharePoint into knowledge management because the infrastructure, licensing, and user familiarity are already in place, not because it was purpose-built for that job.

That reuse can work well for straightforward document storage, but SharePoint has no native concept of a “knowledge article” with lifecycle rules, ownership, or expiration. It treats knowledge content the same way it treats any other file or page, which shapes both its strengths and its limits.

Learn more about SharePoint and whether it’s the right platform for your organization’s knowledge.

Pros and Cons of SharePoint Software

SharePoint’s approach to knowledge management (KM) is inherited from its role as a document and intranet platform rather than designed around KM workflows. That gives it strong collaboration mechanics but leaves gaps in the areas dedicated KM tools are built to solve.

Pros

• Native Microsoft 365 integration: Content created in Teams or Outlook can live in SharePoint automatically, so knowledge capture happens as a byproduct of normal collaboration rather than a separate step.
• Strong version control and co-authoring: Multiple people can edit the same document simultaneously with full version history, which reduces the “which file is current” problem common in KM.
• Granular permissions and compliance controls: Site and library-level permissions, combined with Microsoft’s compliance tooling, make SharePoint viable for regulated industries that need detailed access audit trails.
• Broad existing licensing: Most enterprises already pay for SharePoint through Microsoft 365, so extending it into KM has no incremental software cost, only setup effort.

Cons

• No native article lifecycle: SharePoint doesn’t flag stale content, enforce review cycles, or separate “draft” from “approved” knowledge the way other dedicated KM platforms do, so outdated information can persist indefinitely unless someone manually audits it.
• Search depends on the structure you build yourself: Microsoft Search works across SharePoint content, but relevance depends heavily on metadata and tagging discipline that has to be designed and enforced by the organization, not the platform.
• Deep AI search is a paid add-on: Semantic, natural-language search requires layering in Copilot, which adds cost on top of the base SharePoint license.
• Permissions sprawl at scale: The same granular permissions that help compliance can become difficult to manage once dozens of sites and libraries exist, often requiring a dedicated SharePoint admin.
• Not built for informal knowledge sharing: If the goal is a simple way for employees to ask questions and get answers that become reusable knowledge, SharePoint’s document-and-page model is a heavier lift than the use case usually requires.

Weighing these pros and cons against your actual use case will help determine whether SharePoint alone is enough, particularly around how much of your knowledge needs day-to-day discoverability versus structured document storage. Organizations leaning heavily toward the latter tend to get more mileage out of SharePoint without additional tools.

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Key Features of SharePoint for Knowledge Management

SharePoint’s feature set is oriented toward document management and intranet publishing, so knowledge management capabilities are layered on top rather than built in from the start. That makes it flexible, but it also means organizations have to do more of the design and governance work themselves.

• Document libraries with version history: Centralized storage for policies, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and reference material, with automatic versioning so nothing gets overwritten silently.
• Teams and OneDrive integration: Content created during collaboration syncs into SharePoint sites, connecting everyday work to long-term storage.
• Metadata tagging: Documents can be categorized by topic or department, but consistency depends entirely on manual governance. SharePoint doesn’t enforce a tagging taxonomy on its own.
• Microsoft Search: Baseline keyword search across SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook content.
• Copilot AI add-on: Adds semantic search and content summarization, at additional licensing cost beyond the base SharePoint plan.
• Custom pages and web parts: Let teams design intranet-style knowledge hubs, though the structure, navigation, and findability are entirely the organization’s responsibility to build.

These features make the SharePoint site a reasonable fit for document-centric knowledge that’s already tied to Microsoft 365 workflows. For a company-wide knowledge experience built for everyday discovery rather than document storage, most organizations look to a dedicated platform to sit on top of what SharePoint provides.

SharePoint Pricing Plans: What You Need to Know

When SharePoint is used for knowledge management, cost is typically a byproduct of Microsoft 365 licensing decisions rather than a standalone KM purchase. That distinction matters when budgeting, since the price tag rarely reflects what it actually takes to make SharePoint function as a full knowledge base.

• Bundled into Microsoft 365 tiers: SharePoint (Plan 1) starts around $5-5.60/user/month; Business Standard runs about $12.50/user/month; enterprise tiers like E3 (~$36/user/month) and E5 (~$57/user/month) add compliance, security, and analytics.
• Copilot priced separately: AI-powered search and summarization require the Copilot add-on, roughly $23-30/user/month on top of any base tier.
• Implementation and setup costs: Building out taxonomy, page structures, and navigation for KM use falls on internal teams or Microsoft partners, showing up as project time rather than licensing fees.
• Storage and governance overhead: As content volume grows, admin time to manage permissions and prevent sprawl becomes an ongoing cost that isn’t reflected in the license price.

For organizations already invested in Microsoft 365, these costs are often absorbed into broader IT budgets. For those evaluating SharePoint purely as a KM tool, the real cost includes the AI add-on and the setup work most competitors handle out of the box.

SharePoint Reviews: What Users Are Saying About KM‑Related Use

Reviews on sites like Capterra and G2 describe the SharePoint site as capable for document storage but demanding when stretched into a full knowledge management role. That gap between “good document platform” and “good knowledge base” shows up consistently across user feedback.

Users consistently praise version control, co-authoring, and how naturally SharePoint fits into a Microsoft-centric workflow. Alongside that, a recurring theme is that meaningful KM functionality like organized navigation, effective search, and content lifecycle rules doesn’t exist by default. Teams have to design and maintain it themselves, and that setup work often falls to a small number of admins rather than being self-service for knowledge owners.

Reviewers also note performance slowdowns with large content volumes and permission structures that get harder to manage as more sites are created. Taken together, reviews suggest SharePoint performs well as a document backbone but requires significant deliberate effort before it functions like an actual knowledge base rather than a file repository.

A SharePoint Alternative: How Bloomfire Compares

Choosing between a general Microsoft 365 stack and a dedicated KM platform comes down to whether your priority is document infrastructure you already own or a knowledge experience built specifically for findability like Bloomfire. The table and breakdowns below compare both platforms across the factors that matter most for day-to-day knowledge management.

Bloomfire works alongside or in place of SharePoint—providing the structured knowledge layer that SharePoint lacks.

Platform focus & ideal users

This section looks at who each platform is really designed for and what kind of organization gets the most value from it. The fit depends heavily on whether knowledge management is the primary goal or a secondary use of existing infrastructure.

Bloomfire: A purpose-built knowledge management platform, Bloomfire is ideal for enterprises that need secure, scalable, and AI-ready access to knowledge. It serves industries where speed-to-knowledge, search accuracy, and user engagement are critical, such as healthcare, financial services, retail, and customer experience teams.

SharePoint: SharePoint is primarily positioned as a broad collaboration and document management tool within the Microsoft 365 suite. It’s best suited for organizations with strong IT resources that prioritize compliance, intranet-style content storage, and tight integration with Microsoft apps over user-friendliness or scalable knowledge sharing.

User interface & customization

This section covers how each platform looks and feels day to day, and how much control admins have over shaping that experience without engineering support. Interface design directly affects whether employees actually adopt and return to a knowledge tool.

Bloomfire: A visual, configurable homepage and collections let admins highlight key content and surface multimedia without IT involvement; contributors can publish and tag content independently.

SharePoint: Presents content through sites and pages that follow Microsoft’s application framework. This works for teams already living in Microsoft 365, but building an intuitive, discovery-first destination requires substantial custom design work.

Search experience

This section examines how easily users can actually find relevant knowledge once it’s been stored, which is often the single biggest driver of whether a KM tool gets adopted. Search quality depends on both the underlying technology and how much configuration it demands from admins.

Bloomfire: Uses a proprietary deep-indexed search engine that surfaces results from 29+ content types, including spoken words in videos and audio files. Users can view keyword previews, filter intuitively, and access high-value content with a single click.

SharePoint: Microsoft Search provides keyword-based results across SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook; semantic, natural-language search requires the separately licensed Copilot add-on.

Q&A functionality

This section addresses how each platform handles informal knowledge exchange, such as employees asking questions and getting answers that other people can reuse later. Whether that exchange becomes permanent, searchable knowledge or disappears into a chat thread has a real impact on long-term KM value.

Bloomfire: Promotes collaborative Q&A, allowing anyone to ask questions and crowdsource answers from subject matter experts. These Q&As are automatically indexed and made searchable, helping build a living knowledge base.

SharePoint: Has no native Q&A feature. Question-and-answer exchanges typically happen in Teams chats or email, where they remain informal and rarely become structured, searchable knowledge.

Implementation Services

This section covers what it actually takes to get each platform running as a knowledge base, since setup effort and ownership can differ significantly even between tools with similar feature lists. Who owns that rollout (IT vs. business stakeholders) also shapes how quickly the platform gets adopted.

Bloomfire: Offers dedicated guidance on taxonomy, migration, and adoption, with ownership typically sitting with business and knowledge stakeholders rather than IT alone.

SharePoint: Implementation runs through internal IT teams or Microsoft partners following Microsoft’s technical documentation; structural changes generally require admin involvement, which can slow adjustments to navigation or search behavior.

Bloomfire and SharePoint solve different problems: SharePoint is strongest as the document infrastructure teams already have through Microsoft 365, while Bloomfire is built to be the discovery-first layer that makes that content, and everything beyond it, easy to find and reuse.

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