Just what the title says…
In: Technology
The two are now more or less the same thing accessed in different ways (along with other stuff like Teams etc).
They come from different places, but have now converged into a single thing that users can approach in slightly different ways because they are used to doing things a certain way.
Sharepoint evolved out of Microsoft old attempts to let corporations build websites quickly and easily to share information between workers. This was originally for hosting your own stuff on your own servers and letting team members work together on files and let them view resources.
You could build some pretty crazy things on top of sharepoint but mostly people used it to share office files and to let it act as some sort of digital noticeboard and repository of information for employees.
Microsoft decided a few years ago that rather than letting their customers do their own thing with the software they purchased from them, they would prefer to make them do that stuff in their cloud and rent them access to it. This had the advantage of making them pay over and over again instead of just once.
So Microsoft discontinued Sharepoint as something customer could have on their own servers. They sell them access to something that works the same in Microsft’s cloud.
Onedrive started out life as a sort of DropBox competitor (the two were launched at about the same time).
A place on a server where you could upload files and treat it almost as if it was a local folder on your OS.
Onedrive eventually evolved into the backbone of where people store all their files in Microsoft clouds and where they give each other access.
Sharepoint is just a specialized website view of the contents of special OneDrive folders if you want to see it that way.
This is all a bit confusing and not helped by the fact that every few years Microsoft decides to rename all their products to achieve some sort of common brand.
Onedrive at some point was “Windows Live Folders” when they wanted to call everything online in any way “Windows Live Something” and was then renamed “OneDrive” when for a time they wanted to name everything with a “One” in the name up to an including their gaming console.
They tried to market both onedrive and sharepoint as part of Office for a while. They are now part of “Microsoft 365”.
It is all a mess and hard to keep track of since MS keeps messing with stuff.
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