Is your organization struggling with a tangled mess of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites? You're not alone. Many businesses experience content sprawl – an uncontrolled proliferation of teams and sites – which can significantly impact productivity, collaboration, and even security. This article outlines five key reasons why this sprawl is hurting your organization, and what you can do about it.
Content sprawl in most instances results in ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial) data.
ROT data has little to no business value but is still stored by an organization. It includes outdated files, duplicates, and trivial information.
Research reports suggest that significant percentages (20%+) of organizational data is ROT, which can lead to significant inefficiencies.
What is ROT Data?
- Redundant: Duplicate files or data.
- Obsolete: Outdated or no longer needed information.
- Trivial: Data with little to no business value.
With 2 million sites and 2 billion files created in SharePoint daily, organizational data is growing rapidly and will only increase. Without measures to combat sprawl, organizations will face mounting problems.
Let’s explore the negative effects of sprawl and its ugly progeny that is ROT, and what can be done to address it.
Problem 1 - Storage space
When users can create new teams or SharePoint sites without a controlled creation process, data consumption can quickly spiral out of control, leading to storage limits being exceeded. Reaching your tenant storage limit can have serious consequences.
Consequences of Running Out of Space:
- File uploads blocked: Once storage limits are reached, Microsoft may set your tenant to read-only and no more files can be uploaded to SharePoint.
- Time-consuming cleanup: Identifying and removing unnecessary files is a tedious and painful process.
Solution:
- Controlled creation process: Implement a governance tool to manage the creation of teams and sites. Ensure users only create SharePoint sites or teams when really necessary, and that information which should be stored in other line-of-business systems and doesn’t need collaborative capability or version control doesn’t end up in SharePoint just because it’s convenient.
- Regular audits: Monitor and identify where storage is being unnecessarily consumed by ROT.
- Run ongoing cleanup operations: There are several ways to clean up existing data both on-demand and automatically.
Example Scenario:
A project team is working on a critical delivery item for a client. During this time, the organisation's tenant storage is exceeded, and it just so happens that the Global administrator is on leave and not aware of the warnings about the limit being reached. SharePoint stops accepting new file uploads and read-only access is applied.
The disruption means that the team cannot finalise documentation and may have to save documents on their local devices and can't collaborate effectively. The time it takes to identify and remove content so that space is freed up can be substantial.
The alternative is to purchase additional storage space, but even with this solution there are interruptions and it is expensive (on average $200/month per 1TB of additional storage). It is far better to be proactive about storage consumption.
Problem 2 - Duplication of content
Unchecked creation of teams and sites often leads to duplication of content, which wastes storage space and creates confusion.
Issues with Duplication:
- Unnecessary storage consumption: Multiple copies of the same file take up valuable space.
- Confusion and errors: Employees may reference outdated or incorrect versions of files.
Example Scenario:
Imagine a marketing department launching a new product campaign. Two teams, "Content Creation" and "Social Media," independently decide to build SharePoint repositories for campaign assets. The "Content Creation" team uploads high-resolution images, video clips, and finalized copy, while the "Social Media" team, unaware, begins gathering similar assets from various sources, including potentially outdated versions.
This results in duplicate files, conflicting versions of critical documents, and wasted storage space. When the campaign launches, social media posts might use older, unapproved visuals, leading to brand inconsistencies and potential customer confusion.
Furthermore, the teams spend unnecessary time managing and updating two separate, redundant repositories, hindering their ability to focus on strategic campaign execution.
Problem 3 - Security and Compliance Risks
Sprawl makes it difficult to manage security and compliance, leaving organizations vulnerable to data breaches and regulatory penalties.
Key Risks:
- Oversharing: When responsible parties have too much to manage, they may overlook critical security details.
- Obsolete content: Outdated content with outdated security settings can pose risks.
- Orphaned data: Former employees’ teams or sites may contain sensitive data that is no longer actively managed.
Example Scenario:
In a fast-growing financial services firm, numerous teams and SharePoint sites were created without governance in place. A former marketing intern created a team which only they used, and because governance rules did not enforce multiple owners, a default sensitivity label, or lifecycle management after a period of inactivity, it was created in a vulnerable state.
The intern then uploaded sensitive customer data (names, contact details, and basic financial information) into the site, but left the company soon thereafter. Because they were the only owner, the team was effectively orphaned, but not technical orphaned because the user was not disabled or deleted.
Several months later, with the intern’s account still active, a malicious actor gained access through a phishing attack, accessed the orphaned team, and used the sensitive customer data gained to perform subsequent phishing attacks on customers.
This breach not only led to significant financial penalties for violating data privacy regulations (like GDPR) but also severely damaged the firm’s reputation and eroded customer trust.
Problem 4 - Obsolete Content
Obsolete content—information that is no longer relevant or useful—is a common by-product of Teams and SharePoint sprawl. Without regular reviews, outdated content can resurface, leading to confusion, inefficiency, and security risks.
Key Issues:
- Outdated information: Employees may rely on incorrect or obsolete data, resulting in poor decision-making.
- Outdated security: Unmanaged content often retains outdated permissions, leaving sensitive data exposed.
- Clutter: Obsolete files add to the clutter, making it harder to find relevant information.
Example Scenario:
An insurance provider struggled with obsolete content in SharePoint. Old policy documents and claim forms cluttered their system. Agents inadvertently provided customers with outdated policy details, causing confusion and legal liability.
Claims processing slowed as employees wrestled with superseded claim forms. New agent training suffered from outdated modules, hindering their understanding of current procedures. The sheer volume of obsolete data slowed searches, frustrating employees and impacting both customer service and operational efficiency.
Problem 5 - Trivial Content
Low or no value data can be accumulated when there is no control over what gets created in Teams and SharePoint. This can include personal files, test documents, temporary files, unabandoned projects, or team outing pictures which may not belong in a business site or team.
Key Issues:
- Wasted resources: Trivial files consume valuable storage and make it harder to find important information.
- Confusing AI Results: AI tools may surface irrelevant or trivial content, leading to confusing or inaccurate insights.
- Reduced Data Quality: A cluttered environment undermines the integrity and usefulness of your data.
Example Scenario:
In an organization which uses a SharePoint site per department, employees have created user folders and uploaded several hundred GB of pirated entertainment content in the form of movie and series MP4 files.
This excessive trivial data consumed valuable storage space and exposed the org to legal liability around copyright and piracy.
Data Quality Matters to AI
In addition to the 5 problems mentioned above, AI is the not-so-subtle elephant in the room.
As organizations increasingly rely on AI tools like Microsoft Copilot to surface insights and automate tasks, data quality becomes critical. Unwanted duplicate, obsolete or trivial content can undermine the effectiveness of AI, leading to confusing or inaccurate results.
In severe cases, Copilot may surface extremely sensitive information such as merger, restructuring or layoff plans.
Key Issues:
- Unwanted Content Surfaced: AI tools may prioritize irrelevant or outdated files, reducing the usefulness of their outputs.
- Confusing Results: Poor-quality data can lead to conflicting or misleading insights, hindering decision-making.
- Wasted Potential: AI’s ability to drive innovation and efficiency is compromised when it’s fed low-quality data.
Example Scenario:
Within a SaaS provider, the support team trained an AI model on historical customer support conversations stored in various Teams channels and SharePoint sites. However, due to Teams and SharePoint sprawl, the data was riddled with inconsistencies:
- Obsolete Information: The AI was trained on outdated product documentation found in unmanaged SharePoint sites, leading to incorrect responses to customer queries.
- Trivial Data: The AI model ingested numerous casual conversations and off-topic discussions from Teams channels, diluting the quality of the training data and making it struggle to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information.
- Redundant Data: Duplicate support tickets and responses were scattered across multiple Teams channels, causing the AI to learn conflicting patterns and generate inconsistent answers.
- Poorly Structured Data: Inconsistent naming conventions and folder structures within SharePoint made it difficult for the AI to correctly contextualise the data.
As a result, the AI model produced inaccurate and unreliable responses, frustrating the customer support process and increasing the workload for human support agents. The organization realized that without a clean, well-organized, and high-quality data foundation within their Teams and SharePoint environment, their AI initiatives would be ineffective and potentially detrimental to customer satisfaction.
The solution
To limit the negative effects of content sprawl with SharePoint and Teams, you need to:
- Prevent unwanted and unnecessary Teams and SharePoint sites from being created.
- Ensure that sites and teams which are created, are done so with the necessary governance rules, including approval, security and lifecycle guardrails.
- Monitor the content status of sites to identify the addition of unwanted content.
- Monitor the security status of sites to determine whether security and compliance risks are present, so that they can be addressed.
The problems discussed can all be effectively addressed by a governance tool like SProbot:
- SProbot uses AI to automatically generate descriptions and tags for SharePoint sites based on existing metadata, making it easier for admins and normal users to find the information they need through its content discovery capabilities. This means that before new workspaces are created, there is visibility of what already exists.
- A controlled provisioning process can be set up to give users templates from which to create new teams and SharePoint sites. This helps to standardise workspace frameworks, including document libraries, columns, pages etc. By implementing a request and approval process, you can ensure that teams and sites are only created when truly required.
- Thirdly, SProbot's cleanup tools have powerful functionality to help deal with workspaces that contain large files, test items, as well as identifying duplicate, orphaned, empty and inactive sites. Actions can be taken that include archiving, freezing, deleting or flagging workspaces for review.
Conclusion
Teams and SharePoint sprawl is more than just a minor inconvenience; it's a significant drain on organizational resources, productivity, and security.
The uncontrolled proliferation of sites and the accumulation of ROT data creates a complex web of challenges, from storage limitations and content duplication to compliance risks and hindered AI initiatives. However, this seemingly insurmountable problem is solvable. Implementing a robust governance strategy, coupled with a powerful provisioning and management tool like SProbot, provides a clear path to regaining control.
SProbot's AI-driven content discovery, controlled provisioning processes, and comprehensive cleanup tools empower organizations to streamline their Teams and SharePoint environments, ensuring data quality, security, and efficiency. By proactively addressing sprawl and ROT, organizations can unlock the true potential of their collaboration platforms, fostering a more organized, productive, and secure digital workplace.
Don't let sprawl hold your organization back; take control and transform your Teams and SharePoint environment into a strategic asset.
