Forum Discussion
Small company (8 people) - SharePoint Online Teamsites, Groups or both?
I'm implementing Office 365 in a small company of around 8 people. They have about 150 gb of data on an on prem fileshare that has to be moved to SharePoint. I imagine these are files that have to do with marketing, finance, HR, etc.
With Office 365 Groups added to new sites as the default method when I create a new site, I wonder what the best solution is to create places to store these files:
1 - Create an Group "Marketing" (or any of the other examples) and teamsite.
2 - Use the default teamsite (created with Office 365 subscription) and extend it with several libraries ("Marketing", "Finance", "Hr", etc.)
3 - Create one or more new teamsites (via Admin Center) and use for example the Document Center template, then add several libraries for different kind of documents ("Marketing", etc.)
4 - Other :-)
They don't want to really do anyting with access rights. All employee can see and edit all the files. Allthough I can imagine I can convince them that some documents are not to be seen by everyone (like HR documents), but I'm not there yet.
Bonus question: Is there some place where Microsoft has written their plans with teamsites?
8 Replies
I want to create one Document Center as central file storage. Don't want a Group I guess. What is the best/prefered place to create the Document Center?
- As a subsite of the default teamsite (mycompany.sharepoint.com/document%20center) or
- As a new site collection (mycompany.sharepoint.com/sites/document%20center
I think the choice is related to the question if external sharing is enabled for the site collection? The default teamsite is enabled by default. Should I create seperated site collections? One for internal sites, like the document center and one for sites that are shared with partner companies?
Thanks all for your suggestions! Alltough Teams looks like an interesting solution (a friend of mine is using this approach in a kindergarten/daycare situation where he is part of the staff), I think this is to far out of the comfort zone for my own customer. Until now they have used Windows 7, Offfice 2010 and a SMB2003 server and file storage. The step to Windows 10, Office 2016 and Office365, SharePoint Online, etc. will be a big one. I even got a CEO who wants to save every (usefull) email in a folder structure :S
My own idea is to go with a minimal set of Groups, one for each department. Hopefully I can convince them they can then use the OneNote Notebook for Meeting Notes etc., the Document library for files, and Planner to centrally manage things that need to be done.
Maybe I create a Document Center for central archiving, but that depends on the kind of files they have. I will know that tomorrow, when I have my next meeting.
- Here I link with regards to Microsoft Teams direction etc...
Hope this help
https://blog.hyperfish.com/the-future-of-microsoft-collaboration-through-microsoft-teams-with-dan-stevenson-hyperfish-def08731d52c
Si I agree with Salvatore Biscari's recommendation if you plan on actually using Teams. Teams is great, but if people aren't willing/ready to use it, it will be a lost cause. So don't go to Teams until you sit everyone down and say "this is how Teams works, it can be great, but we have to AGREE HERE AND NOW that we're going to use it". Channels are only a thing in Teams. They don't affect anything else. (Okay, they create folders in the default SharePoint library, but it doesn't stop you from organizing your SharePoint content the way you want outside of that library.)
Regardless, of which type of SharePoint site you decide to use, since the company is so small and permissions aren't really an issue, I would definitely use separate libraries for each side of the business (marketing, finance, HR, as you mentioned). It will let you scale better and also keeps things better separated. (Also, if permissions become a thing later, it's easier to do permissions with a library than a folder in my opinion.) I put together an everyday guide to libraries http://icansharepoint.com/basics-sharepoint-document-libraries/ if you're interested.
A place to read about Microsoft's plans with teamsites may be the Office 365 Roadmap <https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap>
Another good read about the future of SharePoint is found at the following source,
The Future of SharePoint
by SharePoint Team, on May 4, 2016
<https://blogs.office.com/2016/05/04/the-future-of-sharepoint/>Kind regards,
Carnegie Johnson
Given your requirements, you could perhaps think to create a single Team (and hence a single Group, with a single team site, and with a single doclib), and several channels inside it (and hence several separated subfolders in the doclib), one for each "department".
IMHO it's a very, very, simple but effective architecture for very small customers, if there is no need for more elaborated permissions. I have adopted such model for several small customers with good results.
- IMHO it really depends on what you envision as customer needs...if they are only going to use SharePoint to store files, the Salvatore's approach could work....but if you think they need something extra and a per department approach (even being a small company) I would suggest to create a Group per Department so they can have not only the ability to store documents in the Group, but also create other items related to the Group.
IMHO, the good thing about the "single Team / multiple channels" approach that I suggested, is that you automatically get something similar to "subgroups", i.e. a chat space for each channel, a subfolder for each channel, a notebook section for each channel, an email address for each channel etc.
What remains unique, roughly speaking, is the Group modern team site (which can be used as a company-wide site), the Group conversation mailbox (which can be used, say, for emails to/from customers) and, first and foremost, the Group permissions. I've seen in practice that, if you can live with such limitations, this approach could work for very small companies.
Just my two cents...
