Record and re-check

For Salesforce admins, IT and security reviewers, and whoever signs off the budget.

Do this now

Spend twenty minutes producing three figures: your file storage percentage, a count of the workarounds your team already runs by hand, and the date you read them. Write them somewhere a colleague will find them next year. That is the entire task.

Before you start

• You need View Setup and Configuration to open Storage Usage.
• You need read access to wherever your team actually discusses work: Slack, support tickets, email threads, CRM records, meeting notes.
• No admin change, no install, nothing to approve.

How to record it

1. Your storage percentage

Setup, then Quick Find, then Storage Usage. The row you want is File Storage, not Data Storage: documents count against the first and barely touch the second. Ignore Big Object Storage. Record the Limit, the Used and the Percent Used. Allocations vary with your edition, your user licences and anything your org has bought, so the figure that decides this is the one on your own screen rather than any published number, ours included. If you want the arithmetic behind what storage actually costs, we have written that up separately.

2. Your workaround count

A workaround is something a person does by hand because the Salesforce record cannot do it. Count against a fixed list, or the number will not mean the same thing next year. Our use-case pages are one such list: each describes a specific gap, from connecting files to records, to ready-to-go folders, to permission handling, to Experience Cloud access. Our document-type pages do the same job for particular kinds of paperwork. One clear, cited example in your own data is enough for a use-case to count. Nought, one or two is low. Three or more is worth re-reading the guide for.

Until about two years ago this count meant reading tickets by hand, which is why almost no team has one. If your AI is already connected to your Slack, tickets, email and CRM, ask it directly: “List every place someone manually creates folders, syncs permissions, or moves files for a Salesforce record, with a dated example for each.” The analysis stays inside your own environment.

3. Your citation frequency

For each use-case you counted, note how many real, checkable pieces of evidence support it: a dated message, a ticket number, a thread. Then average them. Two matched use-cases carrying four and six citations gives you five. A count with no citations is an opinion. A count with citations is a finding, and it is the version that survives being questioned by somebody who was not in the room.

What your numbers mean

Both columns can be true at once. Storage and workflow are two different crossings, and most teams meet the second one first.

Numbers come back very low? Don't retire anything yet. Re-check the guide's own nine questions first: low today is not the same as low in three years.

When to look again

Diarise twelve months. Look sooner if headcount rises sharply, if a new team starts attaching documents to records, or if somebody asks for a folder rather than a file.

Where this stops

This page settles nothing about SharePoint, identity, migration, volume or cost. It only tells you whether the decision is live yet. If your numbers moved, the three gates on the guide are where you go back to, and the nine questions behind them are where each of those subjects is answered properly. CloudFiles publishes the use-case list this count is measured against, and sells one of the apps in this category. The count itself needs nothing from us.