Although documents can be accessed from almost all the services of the suite, Microsoft 365 has three primary interfaces where users can store, share, and collaborate on files. Both locations are automatically covered under the organization security and compliance requirements:
- OneDrive for Business: Personal documents
- SharePoint Online Sites: Team, group, or department documents
- Teams: Team, group, or department documents
The underlying storage component for all of the interfaces is SharePoint Online. Documents stored in SharePoint Online (or any service that leverages SharePoint) are automatically indexed, support custom metadata, have versioning enabled, and can be synchronized between desktop and mobile devices.
The following table depicts the main differences between OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Teams for Document Storage:
| Feature | OneDrive for Business | SharePoint Online or Teams |
| Storage space | Per user and varies according to the plan, ranging from 2 GB to unlimited storage. An administrator can increase the limit up to 5 TB of storage, but beyond that would require a service ticket up to 25 TB. Beyond 25 TB would require more storage. | Per tenant. Every user license will add to the tenant pooled storage, and administrators will be able to decide if sites will have a manually set amount of storage or if the site storage will be consumed automatically out of the tenant pooled storage |
| Ownership | Per user. Each user is accountable for managing what to do with the files in their personal storage | Per group or user. It is good practice to assign SharePoint site permissions to a security or Office 365 group, rather than individual users, but it is up to each user with the appropriate permissions to decide how to manage the storage space. |
| Teams integration | Yes. Users can access their personal storage inside the Files left rail icon in Microsoft Teams. In addition, inside individual or group chat conversations, files that have been shared are automatically uploaded to the OneDrive site of the user sharing the file. | Yes. Each Team automatically has a SharePoint site, which is where Team's channel files are stored and can be accessed or edited by users. |
| Sync client | Yes. Users can synchronize and access a local copy of their personal ODfB with the sync client. | Yes. Users can decide which SharePoint Online libraries they will choose to synchronize locally, and they can have more than one library synced at the same time. Users can also decide which folders of these libraries will be synced. |
| Mobile client | Yes (OneDrive for Business mobile app). | Yes (OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, and Teams mobile apps). |
| File storage limit (at the time of writing) | 15 GB. | 15 GB. |
| Sharing | Managed by the user, who is the owner of personal storage. Global sharing controls can be configured by administrators to prevent external sharing. | Managed by the SharePoint site, which includes its members, owners, and visitors. If a site is connected to a Microsoft Teams team, user permissions to access files are managed inside the Teams itself. In addition, users with appropriate permissions can also choose to share individual files or folders, without sharing the entire site. Global sharing controls can be configured by administrators to prevent external sharing. |
| Audit logs | Yes. Auditors can review sharing and file activities on OneDrive. | Yes. Auditors can review sharing and file activities on SPO sites. |
We'll explore sharing in the next section.