Successful SharePoint and Teams Setup

Microsoft Teams has introduced a new way of working collaboratively with documents. However, with this flexibility comes questions on how to create some structure to help people access the documents that they need.

Let’s explore some options to setup Teams and SharePoint.

Behind each Team and SharePoint site is a Microsoft 365 Group. This is where you assign the people that will have access. Initially people can be Owners, Members or External Guests.
 

Key to planning an easy-to-use structure is understanding how Teams and Document Libraries work together.

While Teams provides good options for collaboration and conversations, sometimes the organisations need to manage the flexibility of Teams with already established document structures. Organisations may not want a “mess” of new folders in a document library or want to utilise document management features like meta data or check in and approval controls with a set of documents.

This is where Tabs and Add Cloud Storage become useful. However, each operate in different ways.

Scenario:

A team is working on a building project. They have created a team with channels for Meetings, Variances and Budgets. They are using conversations and collaborating well with documents in these channel and SharePoint folders.

However, they also need to refer to and work on general health and safety documents stored in another SharePoint site, and view documents from a previous project for the client.
 
 Instead of moving these documents to the Team, they can link the documents.

This embeds a view of the document library into Teams. Users can navigate to this and interact with documents like they would from a web browser. They will need to have permission to access these documents.

Pros:

Cons:

This option adds a shortcut in the files tab, so users can access all the files they need from the files tab.

Pros:

Cons:

As always it depends on the end goal but consider the following points.