Intranet & file platform

Elium vs SharePoint

SharePoint is where your documents live. Elium is the governed knowledge platform on top: one source your teams and your AI answer from. Most customers run both.

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Global leaders to growing teams, turning knowledge into answers with Elium

L'OréalVINCI
BNP Paribas
BCG
Lime
Council of Europe
Restos du Cœur
Servier
ENEDIS
Fnac DartySPIESavencia

Governed foundation

Trusted answers,

not another document library

In Elium, every article has a named owner, a review date and a validation flow. Stale content gets flagged before anyone acts on it. SharePoint stores files well, but a file store tells you nothing about what is current, owned or safe to follow. Elium is built for exactly that.

  • A named owner on every article
  • Review dates and validation flows built in
  • Freshness, usage and gap analytics

AI you can stand behind

Same Copilot,

more reliable answers

Copilot is good at finding content. Whether that content is current, owned and safe to follow depends on the governance underneath. In the Microsoft stack, that means extra licensing, setup and site-level policies. Elium ships it as product: every article verified and current, and every answer cites where it came from.

  • Every answer cites its source article
  • Permissions respected in every AI response
  • Workswith Microsoft Copilot, agent platforms and Elium's own AI

Delivered everywhere

One source, served

wherever your teams work

Elium serves answers inside the tools your teams already use (Teams, Slack, ITSM tools, portals and your own apps through the API), in every language you work in. Global Operations, Customer Service and IT Support all work from the same source. Documents live in SharePoint. Answers reach every team.

  • Served in Teams, Slack, ITSM tools and portals
  • Multi-language publishing and translation built in
  • Open APIsfor your own apps and agents

Purpose-built, not a project

A platform you run,

not one you have to build

Knowledge management on SharePoint is a build: site structures, permissions, workflows, training. Elium ships those mechanics as product. Business teams create, structure and govern their own spaces. IT stays involved for SSO and integrations, not for day-to-day changes.

  • Purpose-builtfor knowledge creation and discovery
  • Templatesfor procedures, decision trees and policies
  • Run by business teams, with IT onlyfor SSO and integrations

Who is Elium for

Built for the teams who own the answers

SharePoint keeps your documents. These are the teams that need governed answers on top: the same trusted platform, shaped to the work each team does.

Global Operations

Operating knowledge that stays current at every site (SOPs, specs, handovers), in every language.

Customer Service

Approved answers your team can trust (macros, refunds, policy), consistent across agents, AI copilots and self-service.

IT Support

Resolution knowledge that compounds (runbooks, post-mortems, configs): a fix written once deflects the next ten.

AI & Data

A governed source your AI can stand behind (policies, specs, lineage): accurate, audit-ready, never hallucinated.

Strategy & Research

Living market intelligence (analyst feeds, research, reports): signal reaching decision-makers before the call, not after.

Not sure where to start?

Get a knowledge assessment. We look at what lives in your SharePoint and show you the highest-value place to begin.

“When knowledge is only stored on a file server, you're not working in a shared context. It's content management, not knowledge sharing.”

Pascal Coquerel, Head of Outsourcing Development, SPIE ICS

“Each department had found their own way to manage documents. Some teams sent people to SharePoint training who'd come back with thick manuals just to understand the parameterisation. The IT costs were spiralling, and users were frustrated.”

Olivier Cocaud, Knowledge Manager, L'Oréal Operations

  • Independently owned for over a decade
  • Based in Belgium
  • ISO 27001
  • GDPR

Switching to Elium is easier than you think.

Get a dedicated onboarding team

You’re never in it alone. Our specialists design a knowledge structure around your teams, your workflows and your existing content, not a template.

See our deployment services

Migrate with tools and a team

Our tools and team migrate your SharePoint content. We keep the structure worth keeping and help you archive the rest. Most teams are live in four to eight weeks.

How switching works

Get support built for knowledge managers

Always-on customer success, a deep help centre, and training for the people who manage knowledge, not just the people who read it.

Talk to an advisor

And your knowledge stays yours: everything exports in open formats, any time.

FAQ

Questions we hearfrom teams switching from SharePoint

Keep SharePoint for what it does well: documents, team sites and collaboration. Most of our customers do, and use Elium as the governed knowledge platform for procedures, support documentation and the knowledge AI answers from. Moving knowledge into a dedicated tool is worth it when many teams act on it and a wrong answer is costly. See how Elium and SharePoint work together. Our guide to knowledge management tools compares eight of them, and shows which SharePoint governance controls need a paid add-on. Our guide to SharePoint for knowledge management sets out the criteria for each option.
For storing and sharing files, yes. For knowledge that people and AI agents act on, usually not on their own. OneDrive holds each person's files, and SharePoint holds team sites and libraries. Neither gives each piece of knowledge a named owner, a review date and an approval by default, so an outdated page stays visible next to the current one. Teams either build that governance in SharePoint, with site policies and Power Automate, or add a dedicated knowledge platform.
SharePoint is built to store and share documents. A dedicated knowledge base is built to keep answers correct: articles have an owner, review dates and approval flows, and failed searches show what is missing. In SharePoint, an outdated document looks the same as a current one until someone deletes it. In Elium, an article is flagged for review when its review date passes, and stays flagged until someone confirms it is still correct.
Because the governance comes with the product. Business teams create and maintain their own spaces. Review dates and approvals work from the first day. AI answers come from your articles and files and cite them, and an expired article carries a red flag that readers see when they open it. SharePoint can get close, but it takes site structures, policies and workflows that IT has to build and maintain. Most organisations keep SharePoint for documents and add a dedicated tool for the knowledge their teams act on.
Partly, and Microsoft is adding more. Copilot in SharePoint helps people find, create and organise content on a site. Since 14 October 2026, Microsoft's Frontier preview also includes a team knowledge base in SharePoint. It lets Copilot write linked pages from the emails, meetings and files a team contributes. Neither puts a named owner, a review date and an approval flow on each article, and Microsoft lists automated ongoing curation as still to come. AI answers are only as good as the knowledge underneath. You keep Copilot, and agents built in Copilot Studio can use Elium as a governed source over MCP (Model Context Protocol), with each person's own permissions. Read how the team knowledge base works. Our guide to Work IQ explains what Copilot reads and how permissions apply.
Yes. That is a deliberate design choice. Structure changes, new spaces and workflow updates are handled by the project team. IT stays involved for SSO and integrations, not for day-to-day platform work.
Most teams are live in four to eight weeks, not the multi-month projects that big SharePoint overhauls tend to need. See how a switch to Elium works, or start with a knowledge assessment: we look at your estate and give you a clear plan.
Elium is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR-compliant, built and run in Belgium, and hosted in Europe. We work with customers in pharma, finance, public sector and IT services. Full documentation is available in the Trust Center.

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