Send a text

As SharePoint approaches its 25th birthday this March, this episode kicks off a new series focused on how the platform has evolved — and why many organisations are still working in ways that no longer serve them.

In this first episode, I tackle one of the most persistent and controversial habits in SharePoint: naming conventions.

Almost every organisation has a naming convention document. Almost no one follows it consistently. That’s not a people problem — it’s a design problem.

In this episode, I explain why naming conventions made sense in the early days of file servers and folders, why they don’t scale in modern SharePoint, and why I’ve never relied on them to make a solution work across my career. We unpack how metadata, information architecture, permissions, and structure have quietly replaced the need for filenames to carry all the meaning — and why that matters more than ever in a world of AI and Copilot.

You’ll hear real-world examples of how metadata replaces complex filenames, how to keep filenames simple and human-readable, and why governance that depends on people remembering rules is fragile by design. I also talk openly about why naming conventions are difficult to follow in practice, how cognitive load plays into this, and why automating structure leads to better outcomes than policing behaviour.

This episode sets the foundation for the rest of the series, which will cover governance, information architecture, metadata, and the design decisions that actually shape successful SharePoint environments — whether you’re preparing for Copilot, fixing an inherited mess, or building sites properly from the start.

Next episode: why governance isn’t a document you write once and file away — and why real governance has to be built into the design.