You’re in the right place. Here’s where to start.
Simply SharePoint is the home for plain-English SharePoint and Microsoft 365 guidance — written for the people who actually use it day-to-day. Three free and paid resources, one consistent approach: real structure, real fixes, real results.
Three ways to get the SharePoint help you actually need.
Whether you want weekly insights, step-by-step guides, or complete toolkits — there’s a resource built for your level of need. All three connect, all three use the same plain-English approach.
The Blog
Weekly articles on the SharePoint and Microsoft 365 decisions most teams get wrong — and what to do about them. Strong opinions, real examples, no fluff.
- Copilot & AI in SharePoint
- Metadata & document organisation
- Governance & site structure
- Permissions & sharing
The Knowledge Base
Step-by-step workflow guides covering every common SharePoint and Microsoft 365 task. Searchable, no login, every page on Google. Updated for 2026.
- Metadata & Organisation — 45 guides
- Sharing & Permissions — 30 guides
- Copilot & AI — 35 guides
- Document Lifecycle — 30 guides
Products
Plain-English toolkits and guides to fix the mess properly. Workbooks, decision frameworks, audit templates. One-time purchase, no subscriptions.
- Microsoft 365 Collaboration Guide · $12.95
- File Sanity Kit · $27
- Metadata Structure and Planning Guide · $29
- AI Readiness Toolkit · $497
There is no AI without IA.
Copilot doesn’t fix the mess. It amplifies it. If your permissions are inconsistent, your metadata is missing, and your content is duplicated, every AI tool you turn on will surface the chaos faster. The fix starts with structure. Everything Simply SharePoint teaches is built on that one principle.
The 5-phase path. Keep it simple.
You don’t need to “learn SharePoint.” You need to reset how it’s being used. Here’s the exact path I recommend — phase by phase, one fix at a time.
Understand what each tool is actually for.
Before you fix anything, you need to know what belongs where. Most SharePoint environments are messy because the lines between tools blurred over time.
- OneDrive — your personal workspace
- Teams — collaboration and conversation
- SharePoint — structured, long-term content
Clean up the mess.
Now you start fixing what’s already there. You don’t need perfection — you need less chaos and clearer decisions.
- Remove duplicate files
- Identify what should stay vs go
- Stop people from saving things everywhere
Fix the structure.
This is the part most people skip — and it’s why the mess always comes back. Metadata, libraries, naming conventions, filtered views. Search starts working when this work is done.
- A simple structure for document libraries
- Clear rules about where content lives
- Consistency across Teams and SharePoint
Lock it in.
Now you protect what you’ve fixed. This is governance done properly — not a document, not a policy nobody reads. Built into how the system works.
- Permissions — who should see what
- Reducing unnecessary Teams and sites
- Making sure new content follows the same structure
Now you’re AI-ready.
This is where things get interesting. Once your environment is structured, search works properly, content is trustworthy, and Copilot returns useful results. This is where the real value lands — not before.
Pick the path that fits your problem.
Different problems need different starting points. Match yours to one of the four paths below.
“My SharePoint is a structural mess and I want to fix it.”
Start with the Metadata & Organisation collection in the knowledge base. The first three guides — Document Type column, the 3-Level Folder Rule, plain-English naming — solve 80% of the structural problems most organisations have. When you want the complete methodology, the File Sanity Kit is the toolkit.
“I’m worried about sharing the wrong file with the wrong person.”
Start with the Sharing & Permissions collection. The Traffic Light System guide alone has stopped a lot of accidental data leaks. For the complete confidence system, The Permissions Kit ($27) covers every decision.
“Copilot is rolling out and I want to be ready.”
Start with the Copilot & AI collection. Read the AI in SharePoint card first — it’s the most important 2026 development most people haven’t fully understood yet. Fixing the environment itself? The AI Readiness Toolkit ($497) is the complete framework for auditing and preparing your content before rollout. Want to get yourself ready as an individual, not just the SharePoint environment? That’s a different site I’m building at SimplyAIReady.com — start with the AI-Ready Knowledge Worker Playbook ($39).
“I’ve inherited a SharePoint environment and don’t know where to start.”
Start with the Document Lifecycle collection. The guides on version history, archive vs delete, and recovering deleted files cover the questions you’ll get from colleagues in your first month. For governance done properly, the SharePoint Governance Kit ($49) walks through the whole system.
Grab the Free SharePoint Starter Kit.
Practical SharePoint improvements you can make this week — the ones I’ve recommended most often across two decades of consulting. The kind of changes that take an hour but stop people complaining for a year.
- The one column every library should have
- The sharing setting that prevents most data leaks
- The view that makes your library actually findable
- More practical fixes you can apply this week
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Hi, I’m Liza Tinker.
I’m a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint with 20+ years of real-world experience designing and fixing SharePoint environments for organisations across Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada. Simply SharePoint is where I write down what works — for the people who actually use these tools every day, not just the people who run them. Read more about me →
SharePoint isn’t the problem. The way it’s been set up usually is.
Once you fix the structure, everything else starts to work. Pick a resource above and start with the one that matches your problem.