Why We Built Papyrus Instead of Buying SharePoint

When we started exploring document management for African enterprises, the immediate question was: why not SharePoint?

Microsoft 365 is everywhere. SharePoint ships with most plans. Most of the 10-200-person organisations we talked to already had SharePoint sitting unused or under-used. The default path was to teach them to use what they had.

We spent three months going down that path. Then we changed direction. Here's why.

Reason 1 — SharePoint isn't document management

SharePoint is a collaboration platform that includes file storage. The distinction matters. When you put a document in SharePoint, you've put a file in a folder. The system does very little for you beyond storing the file.

Document management is something else: classification, retention, audit, workflows, structured extraction, compliance posture. SharePoint does these things if you build them. Out of the box, it's a glorified file share with version history.

Reason 2 — AI-native means different architecture

The AI features we wanted to ship — automatic classification, structured extraction, semantic search, RAG-powered Copilot — don't bolt on cleanly to a system designed in the early 2000s. We could attach them via integrations, but the resulting product would feel like two things stapled together.

Building from scratch let us make the AI the foundation, not an accessory.

Reason 3 — Kenya-specific compliance

KRA eTIMS, M-Pesa billing, Kenya DPA, KICA eSignatures — every one of these is a customisation we'd build on top of SharePoint. After 18 months of customisation, you've built a Frankenstein. After 36 months, the customer's IT team is maintaining customisations Microsoft never wrote.

Native is better.

Reason 4 — Pricing in Kenyan reality

SharePoint's effective per-user cost in the M365 bundle is fine for organisations that fully use M365. For 50-200-person Kenyan businesses that need just document management, paying full M365 licences for everyone is wasteful.

Pricing in KES with tiers calibrated to Kenyan reality wins the unit economics for the customer.

Reason 5 — Time to value

A SharePoint deployment that delivers real document management value takes 3-6 months and an external integrator. A Papyrus deployment that delivers more delivers it in 1-2 weeks.

We thought hard about whether this was a meaningful difference. It is. Customers who get value in week 1 keep using the product. Customers who wait 6 months get demoralised and quit halfway.

Reason 6 — The mobile story

SharePoint's mobile experience is competent. It's not built for field officers in rural Kenya capturing documents on patchy connections. Building for that audience required different priorities — offline-first, GPS-stamped capture, low-bandwidth mode, push notifications optimised for unreliable networks.

The honest counter-arguments

In fairness, SharePoint wins in some places:

Deep integration with Outlook, Teams, Office apps
Mature enterprise governance for organisations that have invested
Existing skills in the labour market (lots of SharePoint admins)
Single procurement path (no separate vendor management)

For some customers — particularly multinationals with Microsoft-standardised governance — SharePoint is the right answer. We don't argue with that.

What we did instead

The Papyrus approach:

Document management as the primary purpose, not a side effect
AI as the platform, not a module
Kenya / Africa as the design context, not a localisation
Mobile-first for field workers
Pricing in KES
1-2 week time to value

Two years in, this looks right. We have customers who've migrated from SharePoint and customers who never used it. The product makes sense for both audiences.

Closing

The “build vs buy” decision in software is usually answered “buy”. For document management for African enterprises, we concluded “build”. Not because SharePoint is bad — it isn't. Because the requirements were different enough that adapting was harder than starting fresh.

The customers seem to agree.