Forum Discussion
Set up File Structure in Teams App or SharePoint Group
- Hi!
Very good question indeed and this is my take on it:
Yes, all the channels in the team is a folder in the default team site library!
What happens in teams is that each channel file tab mirrors that corresponding folder in sp, which makes people kind of stuck in those folders in teams meaning they can’t see any additional folders in the root!
What you can do is the following:
1. Work as normal here, some from SP and some from Teams but make sure everyone use the channel folders in order to make it easier for Teams users!
2. Add that library as a SP library tab! This way people in Teams will see the whole library ( from the root ) they can then work together with the SP people and see all files here!
3. Create another library for Full collaboration! Above examples creates one issue! The SharePoint folder to channel relation in Teams isn’t that great, meaning if people in SharePoint start messing with these folders, renaming, moving etc - there is a chance thing will mess up in Teams! Currently there’s no way for the SP people to know which folders belong to a channel either! However Microsoft will address this shortly so you can tell!
My recommendation:
Create another library and add that library as a tab in Teams! There’s also the possibility to add that library as cloud storage from within a files tab in Teams! Use this if you want people to still have Teams only documents in the files tab , and have the common files acccesible there too!
Now everyone can work in either SP or Teams and see the same stuff! Also there will be no mess around the folders which is the channels in Teams and don’t have to worry about messing something up and have confusion about the many folders here
As I said, this is just a couple of suggestions and my take on this :)
Adam
There are as of now several issues with using both Teams and the SPO-sites that gets created when you create a new team in Teams.
When you create a new channel, a new folder that mirrors the channels name is created on the SPO-site under Documents.
So far, so good, right?
But what if you want to rename that channel? You can do that, but the associated folder in the SPO-site will not be renamed.
"Well, can't i just rename it on the SPO-site as well then?" No, because the channel will always be linked to a folder with the original name. So if you rename it, the files-tab will no longer show any files and Teams will automatically create a new folder with the original name which is now empty.
In short, it will turn into a mess.
This also goes the other way around; move/rename folders in SPO and it will not mirror onto your associated team and its channels in Teams.
Until Microsoft implement proper mirroring, I would keep these seperate;
create a seperate SPO-site for company file-share and use Teams for projects/meetings/chat, etc.
- Yeah! This is the case! Think about it before naming your channels so you don’t have to change it later. Then don’t mess with names on either side!
Microsoft has been talking about improving this a while now, but haven’t heard anything lately- adam deltinger has the correct answer here
If you look at his older post his recommendation is the best solution at this point in time until Microsoft rectifies it. There is a lot of community members who now want to see this improvements as it's inevitable that you ultimately come across when using Teams for any extended period of time.
Best, Chris
