Smarter SharePoint, Stronger Business: What We Learned from Our National Event Series

Smarter SharePoint, Stronger Business: What We Learned from Our National Event Series

By Brendan Ritchie, Chief Growth Officer – First Focus

At the beginning of 2025, I reached out to dozens of our clients across Australia to understand where they were feeling the most friction when it came to their use of technology. Unsurprisingly, AI adoption was at the top of everyone’s minds. But what stood out as a close second, and often a barrier to AI adoption, was SharePoint.
Clients weren’t necessarily unhappy with SharePoint. But the consistent themes were: “We know we’re underutilising it,” or “We’re not confident in how we’re storing and managing data,” and most importantly, “We’re not ready for AI to sit on top of our existing SharePoint mess.”

So, we took that insight and built our Smarter SharePoint, Stronger Business event series – a nationwide roadshow and education initiative designed to help our clients get practical, real-world guidance on how to make SharePoint work better for their businesses.

Why SharePoint, Why Now?

Three things made this topic timely and urgent:

1. Privacy Act Changes: With updates to Australian privacy legislation in late 2024, the pressure to improve data governance has increased dramatically.
2. AI Readiness: AI promises huge productivity gains, but only if the data feeding the software is structured, accurate, and secure.
3. Storage Costs: AI-generated content, version history, and document sprawl have made cloud storage management a strategic necessity.

As Mia Tait, our M365 Senior Consultant, put it during the Sydney session:

“AI is only as good as the data it pulls from — and for most businesses, that means SharePoint. If we don’t fix the foundation, we’ll just amplify the chaos.”

– Mia Tait: M365 Senior Consultant

Key Takeaways From the Series

Across Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, the sessions consistently circled around three practical themes:

🧭 1. Know Your Data 
Many organisations don’t actually know where all their files live (SharePoint? OneDrive? Dropbox? Teams?). Data sprawl and duplication are huge blockers to effective search and AI integration.

🛡 2. Govern with Purpose 
Oversharing is rampant — often out of convenience (“just send a folder link”).
With stricter privacy rules, organisations need to actively manage permissions, set data classification, and monitor sharing activity. As Mia said: “This isn’t a one-and-done. Oversharing is now a compliance issue, not just a mess.”

🚀 3. Optimise for People, Not Just IT 
Hub-and-spoke architecture, tagging (metadata), and automation aren’t just buzzwords — they make SharePoint easier to use for non-technical teams. Archiving outdated or trivial data isn’t just good housekeeping — it directly reduces cloud spend.

Your Questions, Answered

Each city brought unique perspectives, but several questions came up time and again:

• How do I know if my SharePoint is ‘ready’ for AI?
• What should a data retention policy actually include?
• What tools help monitor oversharing or permission creep?
• How do I manage multiple SharePoint sites across different departments without chaos?

These questions helped shape the ongoing series and have directly informed how we’re evolving our managed SharePoint services in 2025.

Watch the Series

If you missed the live sessions or want to revisit the insights, you can view the recordings from each city — along with supporting materials — by clicking the button below. Whether you’re looking to tighten governance or exploring AI readiness, this series is built to help you take the next step with confidence.

You can also check out other previous and upcoming events on our Events page.