SharePoint Document Library - Architecture

When a company buys a Microsoft 365 tenant and sets up its SharePoint service, it gets a tenant-specific domain that looks something like companyname.sharepoint.com. This creates a dedicated and isolated space on Microsoft’s servers where all the company’s SharePoint data is going to live.

Within a tenant, a company can set up multiple Sites. A site is a dedicated space within a company’s SharePoint environment that has its own path and permissions and usually holds data for specific departments or teams.

Sometimes you will see the word teams in the URL when you open a site. This is because some sites are associated with Microsoft Teams (which relies on SharePoint for file storage), but that does not matter when working with Document Libraries.

A site contains Document Libraries (yes, even multiple of them), lists, pages, and other resources. We can go one level deeper if we open a specific Document Library, then a folder, any number of subfolders, and, finally a file.