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).
Just wanted to update on this post since its inception.
We are now in the midst of creating Communication Sites as our Hub Sites and using MS Teams for all our various teams as a means to manage their projects and tasks etc. However, there are two detractors, again from a management perspective.
- Each MS Teams creates its own Team Site Collection and if there were other team sites or sub-sites for a particular unit in our organization, we would need to then consider migrating content from the source library to the MS Teams library so it can be accessed and managed accordingly.
- There are no security permissions for any Channels created, and last I checked (December, 2018) it was on the board to be worked on, but no news since then as to where Microsoft is in releasing this capability.
- Inability to make the MS Teams site collection a sub-site to the Communication site/Hub site that exists.
- Inability to make a SharePoint Team Site map to a MS Teams. So if you already had a Team Site, new template, and wished to simply use that site as your MS Teams, you cannot.
There's a lot of capabilities still missing that in my humble opinion is very much needed.
In the meantime, we have a wild wild west, where every team is creating a site collection for every project with no ability to tie anything together. From an end-user perspective, its all good. MS Teams provides a way to seamlessly see all the MS Teams you belong to and you can hop from one to another with relative ease. From a management perspective, its a nightmare.
Don't get me started on the document management from Teams either as we are back to the days of file server, where we're creating folders for everything.
Just thought to at least give an update to where we are today. We've chosen, due to the easy adoption by our users, to abandon collaboration within SharePoint Online and choose MS Teams, however, this has completely destroyed any taxonomy we had as well as the ability to manage the Teams permissions. We know we can control the folders permissions from within SharePoint site/document library and it MS Teams will adhere to those permissions, e.g. if you don't have access to a particular folder, you wont know its there. But it has created an additional administrative burden and one that has larger consequences if mistakes are made.
Aria, I can sympathize with your situation. We are slowly rolling out Teams now and already seeing many of the same issues. I am starting to worry about all the folders being created, and not being able use metadata in Teams. We are also just now starting to brainstorm how we are going to handle deleted channels and Teams. The concept I keep hearing from Microsoft is that users should collaborate in a Group, and when done, basically move the important documents to a more official document library and apply metadata. Then the group can be deleted. "Filing" documents is going to be extremely challenging for us to implement. Users don't go back in and move their data. They'd rather just never delete it. Plus, many of our Teams are permanent (like a department), so the folder nightmare is spreading.
Just a couple of comments on your comments :)
- Yes, each team creates its own site and migration is your best option (tools like sharegate make this easier). However, have you considered using the "add cloud storage" from the Teams files tab? You can use this to create a link to any document library, so you could potentially point to your existing documents. Only problem is the "open in sharepoint" link will not take them to their documents.
- On a related subject, I spoke to someone that recommended that we actually never store any documents in channel folders. They said their company had a link in every channel that went back to a central document library, and all the files were appropriately structured from there. If someone erroneously put a file in the channel, they would be told to re-upload it to the main library (or else it would be deleted). I found this an interesting approach and have started trying it for a few groups. I think this approach does require that Group owners are trained well and diligent governing their Team.
- Channel permissions is by far the most requested feature on the uservoice, but I'm not holding my breath. It really messes up their fundamental design/concept and it could be a long while before we see anything.
- I would avoid subsites altogether. Everything I've heard says not to do it. Use Hub sites, and site navigation (mega-menus are out) to tie things together.
Biggest items on our wish list:
- Being able to move/archive Channels!
- Support for renaming Groups/Sharepoint URL. We spend so much time moving things between Groups because the original name wasn't right
- Support for renaming Channels. Renaming a Channel doesn't change the name of the folder, and this causes confusion
- Metadata shown within Teams. In order to mitigate the folder nightmare that is developing, we need to be able to at least see existing metadata in Teams. Editing it would be great.
Eric,
So our strategy around document management has been to actually link a document library, e.g. Project Library, that has all the necessary metadata, content types etc. enabled and if the team activity is around a project, then the final product (folder(s)) and all of its content will need to be moved/copied to that Project Library that has the metadata enabled etc. So that is happening, but I can't tell you how successful it is happening yet, as we're just getting off the ground ourselves. We've put the responsibility on the Site Owners to manage the process and are working on a governance plan for all things SharePoint. God Help Us!!
Other than that your wish list is similar to ours.
I'm still trying to figure out how we can link a Hub site to the Teams, so essentially it is a sub-site to the Hub site. I know they keep saying to move away, but in reality I don't see how. If you don't you're essentially creating lots of site collections to link together via a Mega Menu, which presents its own set of challenges.
Keep me posted on what you're doing, I like to know how others are working through these problems and perhaps learn from each other ;)Thanks for sharing!
I find these discussions with end users easier if I try to avoid groups altogether. The biggest mistake Microsoft made is call "groups" a product. Groups should have just been the new way you secure a SharePoint site or other Office 365 products. Calling out Groups as it's own thing is what has created so much confusion in my opinion. Unfortunately end users still get exposed to Group terminology and therefore confusion reigns.
