Forum Discussion
SharePoint Online vs. Microsoft Teams; Planner vs. Project; Sway vs. PowerPoint
Does something like this help?
Microsoft Teams
What is it?
A chat-first platform for Team Collaboration. Conversations with your team members take place in the Team environment, rather than email. Files associated with your conversations and projects are stored in an associated SharePoint Online site (an Office 365 Group Site) but you may never be exposed to the SharePoint UI.
SharePoint Online
What is it?
Microsoft's document management / collaboration platform, which also serves a number of other collaboration use cases. SharePont is extensible and can incude the management of data in lists, workflow approvals, and document publishing use cases. Team members typically use SharePoint as a place to store and collaborate on files, but the discussions around those assets are typically done via email, Yammer, Skype, or other communications modes (not natively inside SharePoint itself).
Yeah to make it even more confusing - Teams are actually Groups, which are actually SharePoint sites (albeit with some features missing) :-)
People are visual - we're getting in the habit of building infographics to help folks pick what they're looking for. Even short videos which give a brief overview are likley helpful instead of just throwing words at them.
Essentially, they (Groups/Teams) are just user interfaces to the same back-end (Share-Point)... is that correct?
If so, THANK YOU for the Eureka moment. If not, please do correct me so I can update my notes - a full-wall whiteboard - my own personal "infographic"!
No, that's not correct.
Think of Groups as the foundational membership constuct.
Then you layer on UI / end user features for collaboration, using the Group as the membership base for the product (so you don't manage permissions in each workload).
SharePoint - sits on top of Groups
Planner - sits on top of Groups
Teams - sits on top of Groups
et. al.
Boy I liked how this thread was progressing until I got to this last post. I was right there with Jessica.
But maybe I'm misunderstanding Kevin's post.
Kevin, do you not like the statement "Teams are really Groups, which are actually SharePoint sites"?
When you say "foundational membership construct", you're not trying to describe the situation in any sort of OSI model way?
Simplistically, I think you're saying you have to be authenticated by Groups to access SharePoint. But after that happens, isn't SharePoint basically the lowest layer of software. SharePoint is some sort of big database + UI while Teams is a stripped down version of SharePoint with a different UI?
I'd throw in more questions but I ran out of question marks!
No, that's not what I was saying.
Again, the Groups service that is a membership layer is at the bottom. That membership construct provides the foundation for a number of services in Office 365 that subsequently leverage the Groups service.
SharePoint Online sites based on Office 365 Groups (which I refer to as "Group Sites" to differentiate from traditional "team sites") are a workload in Office 365.
Teams is a completely separate workload from SharePoint, but one that leverages the same O365 Groups service for membership of the Team. The "hooks" that Teams has with SharePoint are basically elegant side-loading of documents from Teams conversations and dropping them into a SP document library.
Teams aren't Groups. Groups aren't SharePoint. That is 100% accurate.
