Forum Discussion
Creating a shared folder - what's the "official" method?
- No, your doing it the only way you can do it through the standard SharePoint / OneDrive UI. The automating of joining to shared folders is something the OneDrive team is looking at but nothing can be done out of box. I believe their might be a few 3rd party solutions that can manage the automation as well.
Alex,
I really appreciate the tips and warnings about using Sharepoint for file hosting. I have to admit, I've been a little confused about how Sharepoint and OneDrive (for Business) are intertwined. For example, if I look at my personal OneDrive space online, I have the ability to view files in Sharepoint sites from the same UI. In addition, if I drill down into advanced file permissions, I'm taken to a Sharepoint page for managing said permissions. It makes me wonder if OneDrive is using Sharepoint as some sort of underlying technology, maybe even as the core file storage system?
At any rate though, I'm just happy to have a solution and to have the knowledge you've given me. Many thanks!
Well, yes, it is confusing because the UI is not always as clear as it could be. There is an awful lot of mixup between the old interface and the new one which can be very confusing. It is and will get better over time. ;)
My biggest tip (and warning) is that you should not try to share single files or folders with few users. This can get very confusing in a very short time. Instead use Sharepoint permission groups (or simply use "All users, without external users") in order to share whole document libraries or Sharepoint (sub-)sites with groups of people.
- StephenRice
Microsoft
Glad I could help stsm_glen!
Alexander Forst-Rakoczy, I'm curious why you avoid sharing single files and folders? While what you describe certainly works, we do strive to make sharing of individual files & folders both easy to do and easy to manage.
Thanks!
Stephen Rice
OneDrive Program Manager II
Alexander Forst-Rakoczy, I'm curious why you avoid sharing single files and folders? While what you describe certainly works, we do strive to make sharing of individual files & folders both easy to do and easy to manage.
We almost never share individual files or folders because we work in projects with hundreds of individual files and folders.
Our project managers would have to share
- project handbooks
- task lists
- notes
- intermediate documents
- protocols
- status reports
- etc.
which would be much more work and clutter up everybody's "shared with me" lists. Our project managers also work in more than one project at the same time. So you would have to assign unique names so that you are able to know which project a shared file belongs to.
Instead we use SharePoint Sites for customers and sub-sites for projects with this customer. Everybody has access to the site (and thus to all sub-sites). If external persons have to work in those projects they get access to the respective sub-site.
So we only have to create a site and assign the correct access rights once. This also includes access to the respective task-list, notebook, and calendar for the project. Sub-sites inherit the access rights of their main site automatically. If we would use file or folder sharing we would have to think about sharing (and access rights) every time for every single file or folder!
We might use Microsoft Teams for some projects in the future, for example when we have projects where people are working in different locations. As of now we simply use physical meetings instead of chats or video conferences. ;)
Microsoft Groups and now Teams focus more on the interaction between participants and single documents. Instead our projects are focused on (lots of) files.
TL;DR
We don't "avoid sharing single files and folders". We don't have the need to share single items. Instead we have a need to access lots of files and folders and thus we use SharePoint sites and sub-sites.
Alex
Stephen,
Thank you for that overview, I have a better understanding now of how OneDrive and Sharepoint work together. It makes more sense now with how the OneDrive online UI is setup - you can access both your private files and sharepoint site files in once place. That's actually really convenient.
Alexander,
The manual folder/file sharing thing is definitely something I was hoping I could avoid. Using Sharepoint to organize groups seems to be the ideal solution at this point, so I'm a happy camper. Thanks guys!
