SharePoint best practices and a new knowledge base

Simply SharePoint — Weekly

Simply SharePoint

Plain-English Microsoft 365 · Tuesday 21 July 2026

🆕 New at Simply SharePoint this week

The Knowledge Worker Playbooks have landed — AI for real work

A whole new section of the Knowledge Base: twenty plain-English cards on working with AI — ten foundations that never date, and ten real tasks like meeting minutes, status reports and board papers. Each one: what AI does, what stays yours, and one prompt that works. There’s a new YouTube series to go with it — the first video is below.

Explore the Playbooks →

Watch: the new AI & Future of Work video

▶️ Watch the new video on YouTube

The Metadata Series rolls on — a free training course, one Short a day

One Knowledge Base card, one YouTube Short, every day. Follow along and by the end you’ll know exactly what metadata to use, when — no course, no login, no cost.

Follow on YouTube so you don’t miss a day →

New on the blog: 20 SharePoint Best Practices

Twenty habits that separate the SharePoint environments people love from the ones they endure — in plain English, ready to steal.

Read the post →

The second list is longer

Every week now, someone asks me a version of the same question: am I falling behind on AI? They’ve seen the headlines, the LinkedIn victory laps, the colleague who apparently automates everything. And they’ve quietly concluded that everyone else got a manual they missed.

Here’s my honest answer, after twenty years of watching workplace technology arrive: you’re not behind. The hype is. Because what actually matters about working with AI fits in two lists — and neither of them changes when the tools do.

AI helps you: ✍️ Draft · 📄 Summarise · 📊 Analyse · 💡 Create

You provide: 🧠 Judgement · ❤️ Empathy · 🤝 Relationships · ⚖️ Ethics · 🎯 Decisions

Notice the shape of it. AI’s list is production — the making of words, summaries and starting points. Your list is meaning — what’s true, what’s right, what’s kind, what happens next. And your list is longer on purpose. You bring more to the table. That’s the point.

One more thing the lists teach: every AI-assisted task worth doing runs Human → AI → Human. You frame the work. AI contributes. You verify, complete and decide. Nearly every AI disaster you’ll ever hear about is a missing bookend — nobody framed the task, or nobody checked the result before it went to the boss. The middle was never the risky part.

That’s the thinking behind the new Knowledge Worker Playbooks — the same promise as the rest of the Knowledge Base, pointed at AI: one card, one real task, five minutes, no hype. Start anywhere. The lists travel with you.

⚡ This week’s tip — 15 minutes

Pick one task from last week that was pure production — an email, a summary, meeting notes. Brief AI like you’d brief a junior: goal, context, audience, constraints, output format — five lines, two minutes. Run it in a tool your workplace allows (nothing confidential), then verify and finish it yourself. Note the time you saved. That note is the start of something.

🎯 Because AI reads whatever your files actually are

The Complete System Bundle

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Get the Complete Bundle — $149 →

See you Tuesday,
Liza

P.S. New here, or forwarded this by a colleague? The free SharePoint 12 Tips Guide is the best place to start — twelve practical fixes, no videos, no jargon.

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Jul 20 • 2 min read

SharePoint best practices and a new knowledge base

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