From SharePoint to OneDoc

A few days ago I visited the knowledge management system of a large manufacturing company. At first glance it looked impressive — and it was built on what the company already had: SharePoint.

Dozens of documents, a perfect folder structure, systematic naming conventions.

You could see the enormous amount of work put in over many months.

On top of that, there were automations developed together with the IT department — handling document archiving and sending notifications.

Permissions were clear and simple:

files read-only,
editing only by the administrator

and that genuinely helped maintain order and full control.

But during conversations with the users, I quickly identified the typical problems:

If someone wanted to recall a piece of information, they had to at least roughly know which folder and file to look in.
If someone wanted to add, update or correct something, they had to contact the administrator — so they usually didn’t bother.
The administrator had to go through many steps just to apply a small correction.
And knowledge still leaked out onto local drives, where documents very quickly became outdated — despite the red warning at the top of each file saying the current version was on SharePoint.

In the past I had built and deployed knowledge bases on Word files on network drives, wikis, LaTeX, WordPress, Sphinx. Each solved some problems but made others worse. After years of working with such systems, I noticed that everything comes down to four things:

how quickly I can find information,
how easily I can update and correct it,
where I can learn more,
and whether the content has a consistent format.

After many years and several such projects, we started asking ourselves: can this be done more simply?

OneDoc was born from those questions :).

To illustrate the difference, I put together a simple comparison:

the most commonly used system based on folders and files (SharePoint, Google Drive, company NAS)
versus a dedicated knowledge management tool (OneDoc).