Why this matters
When users don't know which app to use, content sprawls. Project files end up in OneDrive, important conversations stay buried in email, working drafts live forever in SharePoint, and Teams accumulates stale workspaces. A simple, well-communicated set of rules — what each app is for, what it is not for, and where things go when they outgrow their original home — prevents most of that.
The four definitions below are the platform's working model. Adopt them, communicate them, and reinforce them in every workshop, request flow, and onboarding session.
Email — organized around messages and delivery
Email is the right tool for internal and external communication, notifications, approvals, and formal exchanges. It is best used to link to content, not to attach it. Email is transitory by default — most messages do not have long-term value, and treating the inbox as a corporate archive creates information management problems that compound for years.
What belongs in email:
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Communication with internal and external recipients.
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Formal notifications, approvals, and confirmations that are themselves the deliverable.
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Scheduled correspondence (newsletters, calendar invites, alerts).
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Links to content stored in SharePoint, OneDrive, or Teams — not the content itself.
What does not belong:
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Working files that other people will collaborate on.
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Final-version documents that someone else may need to find without your help.
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Personal archives of operational decisions that should be visible to the team.
If an email matters beyond the conversation, it needs to be captured somewhere else — usually SharePoint or OneDrive. The mailbox is not the system of record.
Kybera Impact applies a default email retention policy at the tenant level (typically two-year disposition after last modified) and a 30-day rule on Deleted Items and Sync Issues folders. These are surfaced to users during onboarding so the rule is known, not discovered. Kybera Impact does not currently move email content automatically — that remains a user behavior, supported by tools like Harmon.ie and the standard Outlook 'save to' integrations.
OneDrive — organized around the individual
OneDrive is a personal workspace. It is the right place for drafts, individual notes, work in progress that has not yet been shared, and content tied to the individual user rather than the team or the organization. Files in OneDrive are owned by a single user, governed under that user's identity, and subject to disposition when the user leaves.
What belongs in OneDrive:
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Drafts and personal working copies before they are ready to share.
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Reference materials and notes that are useful to one person, not the team.
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Files received from outside the organization until they are filed elsewhere.
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Personal productivity content (templates, snippets, scratch work).
What does not belong:
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Project files, departmental records, or any content owned by more than one person.
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Business-critical artifacts that the organization needs to find without that user's help.
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Long-running operational content. If two people will edit it next month, it does not belong here.
If the work belongs to a business area or a project, it shouldn't live in OneDrive. Sharing a OneDrive folder doesn't make it team-owned — it just makes it harder to govern.
Kybera Impact applies a generic OneDrive retention policy with an opt-in 'keep longer' label users can apply to specific files that need to outlive the default disposition window. The Insights module reports on OneDrive volumes, sharing patterns, and stale content so the platform can intervene before personal storage becomes a de facto corporate repository.
SharePoint — organized around the organization
SharePoint is the official corporate repository. It is the right place for content owned by a department, a function, a community, or the organization at large — anything that should be findable, governable, and durable independent of any one user. SharePoint replaces shared drives, intranet pages, and most document repositories that pre-date the cloud.
What belongs in SharePoint:
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Departmental, functional, and operational content.
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Long-running collaboration that outlasts a project or a person.
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Policies, procedures, reference materials, and intranet content.
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Records and content with regulatory or compliance weight.
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Content that needs structured metadata, content types, or lifecycle rules.
What does not belong:
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Personal drafts (those go to OneDrive).
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Active conversations (those go to Teams chat or channels).
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Email correspondence that hasn't been captured as a deliverable yet.
If work needs to be shared, structured, and findable by the organization, it belongs in SharePoint.
Every SharePoint site provisioned through Kybera Impact is created from a defined template, tagged with a Business Authority and purpose, connected to a hub, and made visible to Insights and Compliance. The Library Catalog standardizes how content is filed across the tenant. None of this is automatic without a provisioning system in place.
Teams — organized around people and projects
Microsoft Teams is the workspace for projects, cross-functional initiatives, committees, and active collaboration. It combines chat, meetings, files, and tasks in a single context. Teams is best when a defined group of people are working together actively and need conversation, decisions, and files in one place. It is intended to be time-bound: most Teams have a natural lifespan and should be archived or disposed when their work is done.
What belongs in Teams:
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Project workspaces with a clear start and end.
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Committees, governance bodies, and recurring forums.
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Cross-functional initiatives that need their own communication channel.
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Communities of practice and professional groups (with longer retention defaults).
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External collaboration scoped to a defined channel or workspace, where appropriate.
What does not belong:
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Long-term records or governed content (those belong in SharePoint).
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Personal drafts (OneDrive).
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Static reference content (intranet / Communication site).
Teams gives projects a workspace with conversations, meetings, and tasks — not just a place to store files. If you need files but not the conversation, SharePoint is the better home.
Teams in Kybera Impact are provisioned in three flavors with different lifecycle defaults: informal collaboration, professional groups & engagement, and project & work-initiative.
Project Teams have a defined end date. When the work is complete, the Lifecycle module archives the Team to read-only, holds it for a configurable retention window (typically two years), then disposes the entire Team — chats, files, planner, channel folders. Owners are notified and given a window to capture any artifacts that should outlive the Team.
Rule of thumb to say out loud: If the work belongs to the business, it doesn't belong in email or OneDrive — it belongs in SharePoint or Teams.
The four-app heuristic
When in doubt, walk through the four questions in order. The first one that fits is the answer.
| Question | If yes, the answer is |
|---|---|
| Is this an active conversation, decision, or coordination among a defined group? | Teams (chat or channel) |
| Is this a deliverable owned by a department, function, or the organization? | SharePoint |
| Is this a personal draft or working copy not yet ready to share? | OneDrive |
| Is this a message, notification, approval, or formal exchange? |
Reducing internal email by shifting routine team communication to Teams chat improves visibility (decisions are searchable in context), shortens response cycles, and reduces inbox load. This is a behavioral change, not a configuration change — driven through champions and adoption, not policy.
The four-app model is a working heuristic, not a rigid rule. Reasonable exceptions exist (e.g., OneDrive used as a temporary staging area for content destined for SharePoint). The point is to have a default answer everyone agrees on, so exceptions are visible and intentional rather than ad hoc.
Discussion Questions
• Do users in this organization get the same answer when they ask 'where should I store this?' from IT, IM, and their manager?
• What is our default email retention? Have users been told?
• What is OneDrive for, and what is it not for, in our environment?
• Are we comfortable treating SharePoint as the official corporate repository, including for content that currently lives in shared drives or legacy systems?
• Do we want to use the three Teams types (informal / professional / project) or simplify to one or two?
• How do we want to handle the lifecycle of project Teams when the project ends?
• Are we actively trying to reduce internal email, or letting current habits continue?