I can't find anything in SharePoint

IT and HR hear it constantly: “I can’t find anything in SharePoint.”

Variations: “Can someone send me the link to the vacation form?” “Where’s the latest travel expense template?” “I tried SharePoint but gave up after ten minutes.”

The frustrating part: the content is there. Someone carefully structured it, organized it into folders, added metadata. The problem is not the content. The problem is that nobody can find it.

Why search isn’t enough

SharePoint has search. Confluence has search. Google Drive has search. And yet people still ask in Slack where things are.

The reason is that search assumes you know what you’re looking for. If you need the vacation form, you have to guess whether it’s called “Vacation Request,” “Leave Form,” “Absence Request,” or “HR-Form-017.” In SharePoint, a document might sit under any of those names, and search returns 200 results, 180 of which are outdated.

Then there’s the folder structure. SharePoint sites are typically organized by department. The vacation form is under HR. The travel policy is under Finance. The VPN guide is under IT. If you don’t know which department owns what, you’re navigating folder trees blind.

For people who’ve been at the company for years, this isn’t a problem. They know where things are because they learned it over time. For new hires, interns, or colleagues from other departments, it’s painful.

What’s actually going on

When your intranet has low adoption, the platform itself is rarely the issue. SharePoint isn’t perfect, but it works. The adoption problem is usually structural.

The folder hierarchy grew over years without a plan. Teams built their own sites, their own conventions, their own naming schemes. At some point nobody wanted to clean it up.

The URLs don’t help either: https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/HR/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?id=%2Fsites%2FHR%2FShared... Nobody memorizes that. So people bookmark it. And when the site gets restructured, every bookmark breaks.

There’s also no good entry point. The SharePoint homepage shows news and announcements, but nobody opens it when they need the vacation form. They want to go there directly, and “directly” means three clicks through sub-pages.

What you can do without replacing SharePoint

Migrating away from SharePoint takes months to years. And maybe SharePoint as a platform isn’t the problem at all. Maybe just the access needs fixing.

The idea: put a navigation layer on top of your existing intranet. Instead of fixing the folder structure (a time-consuming project), give the 20 to 30 most important resources human-readable addresses.

short/vacation goes directly to the form, no matter where it sits on SharePoint. short/travel-expenses goes to the policy. short/vpn goes to the setup guide. short/org-chart goes to the current org chart.

Employees learn the shortcut names, not the SharePoint structure. When IT restructures a SharePoint site or moves a document, they update the URL behind the shortcut. The name stays the same. No bookmark breaks.

What changes in practice

This isn’t a big project, but it improves how people experience the intranet.

Before: looking for the vacation form. Open SharePoint, click HR, click Forms, scroll through 40 documents, find three versions, pick the wrong one. Or give up and ask in Teams.

After: employee types short/vacation. Lands on the right document. Done.

SharePoint itself doesn’t change. But employees no longer need to understand the structure.

The second effect: IT and HR get fewer “Where do I find…?” requests. In many companies, these make up a measurable share of internal support tickets. Not because people are too lazy to search, but because searching takes too long and the results are unreliable.

What you need to set it up

A shortcut service that maps short, memorable addresses to URLs. A way to share shortcuts across a team (not just personal bookmarks). And a browser extension so that short/vacation works directly from the address bar.

Setup effort: one hour for the first 20 shortcuts. Then maybe five minutes a week for maintenance when URLs change.

Compared to a SharePoint redesign (weeks to months) or a migration to another system (months to years), that’s nothing.

What this doesn’t solve

If your SharePoint content is outdated, better navigation won’t help. If the documents are wrong, a faster path to them doesn’t matter much. Navigation fixes access, not content.

And if your problem isn’t finding things but chaos in the structure itself, you need to clean up first. Shortcuts on top of a mess just give people faster access to the mess.

But if the content is solid and people just can’t find it, better navigation is the cheapest thing you can try.