SharePoint getting lost in the Cloud?

My experience is that though most Office 365 users include SharePoint (sites) in their tenant, the real use is coming from Exchange Online, Office ProPlus, and OneDrive.

Most people seems to think OneDrive settles the document storage needs.

They are wrong in a number of ways.

The most obvious problem is a OneDrive is that when you lose a staff, and end their license, all their documents go with them.

What you need is a central place to put key documents and lists that you company needs beyond a single users.  These documents you might want version controlled, assigned with metadata, and searchable.

What you want is Sites which is SharePoint in Office 356. Better yet SharePoint with Delve, allowing your users to see the socially most significant documents in circulation.

Planning a proper Sites configuration is not technically hard but it is a lot of work to create a good Information Architecture, that is a plan of sites and subsets.

Here are some simple rules:

1. Regardless of what anyone says the hard limit for supported Sites is 200 GB.  So if you have a lot of content to store make many sites.
2. Don't rely on your company structure to provide the structure for the sites, rather find out what people need or let teams design they own layout.
3. Keep it clean and simple, don't worry too much about colours or new layouts.  Spend effort on design of layout and making it easy to use over making it look a certain way.
4. Use Wikis, they are easy light weight way to store data.
5. Keep pushing users to it, if they have a question don't write an answer when a link in a wiki exists, have the search for it in the wiki.  Get users to learn the independent way of looking for things, break the ask first habit.
6. Have people who have keeping SharePoint up to date and clean as part of their jobs.
7. Find energetic people who want to work with Sharepoint.