Forum Discussion

Aragorn's avatar
Aragorn
Iron Contributor
Sep 03, 2018

Deploying new team sites and Teams - what is the best thing to do?

Hi,

When deploying team sites what is the best option, if we don't plan to use MS Teams now but its on the road map in couple of months.

 

Option 1

  1. Create team sites for each department
  2. Create new Teams later on for each department with its own connected team site
  3. Add the departmental team site \ document library as a tab to the relevant Team.

Option 2

  1. Create team sites for each department
  2. Connect team site to office 365 group
  3. Create Teams later on and connect to existing relevant office 365 group

Option 3

  1. Create Teams for each department now
  2. Create links to the SharePoint team site created during Teams provisioning
  3. Guide users to use this team site and train users on Teams later.

With Option 1, I need to train users to contend with two team sites. One where all of their documents are stored and the other where any files uploaded into Teams are stored. Can be confusing.

 

With Option 2 and 3 I don't like the fact Teams forces you to use the default Documents library. But makes it less confusing for users as there is only one team site.

 

Thanks

SharePoint Online

5 Replies

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Sep 03, 2018
    Agree with starting out on Teams now, I decided to start rolling out Teams for my SharePoint Online migration and tackle them together. This way you can design Teams and Comm sites around it. I would have Department sites for the whole departments, and larger departments would have sub department Teams. But each Department would also have a Org facing Comm site where they could put org searchable / needed content on it, and also news, which would roll up from that Org Department site to the main Intranet Home hub site. Works pretty well.

    Then all that is left is down the road an Org Team, and then functional cross department Teams.
    • Aragorn's avatar
      Aragorn
      Iron Contributor
      Sep 04, 2018
      Deleted wrote:
      Agree with starting out on Teams now, I decided to start rolling out Teams for my SharePoint Online migration and tackle them together. This way you can design Teams and Comm sites around it. I would have Department sites for the whole departments, and larger departments would have sub department Teams. But each Department would also have a Org facing Comm site where they could put org searchable / needed content on it, and also news, which would roll up from that Org Department site to the main Intranet Home hub site. Works pretty well.

      Then all that is left is down the road an Org Team, and then functional cross department Teams.

      Did you have any challenges when you rolled them out together? Was it too much change for users and how did you manage it? The plan is to have an org facing site for each department where they can share content across the company and a private site for each department to collaborate with each other. From the comments I assume it would be better to roll out teams from the outset, this in effect will replace the private sites?

  • John Wynne's avatar
    John Wynne
    Silver Contributor
    Sep 03, 2018
    Hi Paul, As of now I think the outline Matt Weston suggested is the most practical in your situation. I expect there to be much greater interoperability between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint in the coming months. I’d expect at least some of that ‘better together’ story from Microsoft Ignite later this month. Starting again I would work Teams and SharePoint together. Interested as to why you have Teams on the roadmap ‘in a couple of months’. If you are deploying in a larger organisation consider piloting Teams early so you can gain experience contemporaneously with SharePoint. Hope this helps! Good luck!
  • Matt Weston's avatar
    Matt Weston
    Iron Contributor
    Sep 03, 2018

    Hi Aragorn. 

     

    I would personally go with Option 4 for your rollout which is to create your department sites as Modern Team Sites i.e. you create them from the SharePoint home page. Then, later on, when your rollout plan allows, you can create a Team from those sites. The only thing to consider with this, is that any documents which are created on the site won't appear in Teams straight away unless you've created the relevant folder structure in the documents library already. E.g. if I create a "General" folder in my document library, this will map to the General tab when I create my Team.

     

    This way, you will only have one SharePoint site associated with the department which your users can populate with content, and then when the time is right you're adding functionality rather than giving them something else and expecting your users to roll with it.

     

    I hope that helps