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What are the differences?

OneDrive is used to store personal files (working files, photos and other documents) that are primarily used by their author (i.e., the owner of a Microsoft 365 account). By default, all documents uploaded to OneDrive are accessible only to the OneDrive owner and others (including Microsoft 365 administrators) do not have access to these files. When needed, the user has the ability to share their existing files or folders with other persons. This is set at the individual file or folder level.

SharePoint is used for sharing files at the organization level. This can be a separate workgroup, a Microsoft Teams, or an entire organization. The main difference from OneDrive is that access rights are usually set at the level of the entire SharePoint site or document library. This means that once the permissions are configured, all subsequently uploaded files and documents are automatically shared with the appropriate users. In addition, different user groups can be created, such as: 1) site administrators with full rights; 2) department employees with editing rights; 3) guests with read-only rights.

Why using OneDrive for shared organization files is bad practice?

Sometimes there is a situation where one employee of a company (such as a company manager or another person) shares their OneDrive with other colleagues and this becomes the company’s online file storage. Please note that this bad practice. One of the main reasons is what happens when the OneDrive owner leaves the company or their Microsoft 365 account is deleted. Because there is only one owner under the OneDrive architecture, deleting the associated Microsoft 365 account will cause all the information and data to be lost on OneDrive as well.

Moreover, there is also the associated risk is that, for one reason or another, a user’s Microsoft 365 account may be compromised. In this case, there is a threat not only to the employee’s personal data, but also to the files of the entire organization.

Lastly, using OneDrive for enterprise file sharing purposes consumes the user’s OneDrive space, leaving less space for storing personal files.

Therefore, a much better option is to create a separate SharePoint site for storing enterprise documents, with one (or more) system administrators with full rights and other users who, for example, do not have the ability to accidentally delete the SharePoint site and the documents stored on it.

Additional SharePoint functionality that is not available in OneDrive.

In addition to the benefits of the SharePoint rights groups mentioned above, SharePoint also has additional functionality not available in the OneDrive environment, such as:
•    Creating a news or intranet portal for employees.
•    Creating SharePoint lists for storing various information.
•    Visual configuration of the SharePoint environment according to the company’s color scheme, etc.
•    Ability to connect additional Microsoft services (Power Automate, Power BI, etc.)

How much storage is provided?

Each Microsoft 365 user gets 1TB of OneDrive storage for personal files. The enterprise then receives an additional 1TB of SharePoint data capacity at the organization level, which does not count towards the 1TB of OneDrive data for users. An additional 10 GB per user is also provided from each user.

For example: A company has 5 employees, each with a Microsoft 365 account.
In this case, each of the 5 employees receives 1 TB of data for their personal OneDrive.
And the organization additionally gets 1TB + (5 x 10 GB) = 1 050 GB of data in SharePoint storage.