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.
- In one casual sentence, if I'm understanding you correctly, you've made more sense than hours of wading through documentation.
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!
Understanding whats what and what these apps are capable of is challenging, and Microsoft definitely needs to improve it's marketing strategy and collaborate more with their development teams. However, to back up Aria here, even with good knowledge of these products, the challenge for businesses like ours is the strategy around how to implement these. The typical answer is to "let the users pick what they need," but even if we trained the users on how the apps work, we have no strategy around what they should pick.
For example, our organization has some people trying teams, but now they're doing some work in the teams, saving files in a group named similarly but not created for the same purpse, attaching some files to yammer, then wondering why they aren't saving the documents on their department team site for centralized storage. We are in a position to completely revamp our intranet, and yet we haven't been able to move forward without understanding how we're going to tie all these pieces together, and how to decide where to put what.
JaredMatfess would you be willing to share some of your infographics, or provide some of your sources for informative training videos?
