Forum Discussion
Team site vs communication site for project collaboration
I'm looking for some advice on how to best align what I am trying to accomplish with microsoft's grand plan with SharePoint (and just about ever other application they are newly developing). Currently in my organization we are almost 100% project driven:
- Almost all work is associated with a project.
- The concept of a "team" is very loose; many individuals are working on many parts of many projects simultaneously.
- Documents are usually tightly coupled with a project, not the "team" working on them.
From my understanding a "Group" (office 365 group) is the defacto entity that all sharing and documents are organized around, but this is at odds with what I am trying to organize. We cant have all projects living under one or 2 Groups based on departments (people who commonly work together on tasks) as that would quickly dissolve any value or focus the site had, but we also cannot make a Group for each project, as we would quickly have hundreds of groups with very similar members (but not all the same) leading to chaos and redundancy.
An alternative I have been looking into is using Groups for departments, and then using communication sites to host projects, but I from what I gather communication sites are not really meant for collaboration. I would also like to integrate MS Teams into this formula for the tight collaboration it offers with the whole new office suite. I certainly don't want a team per project, so again I imagine 1 team for each department, and then perhaps a channel per project. Maybe even a "Projects" Group/Team for those conversations to live under. Can a group be linked to a hub site/can a Group site be turned into a hub site for our project communication sites? We are looking at MS Planner too.
Another key here is that I need a segregation of project documents, but while also having important information visible at some top level for users to see things that are time-relevant to them.
- Planner seems to do this well with the "My Tasks" app in Teams
- Communication sites seem like they might have this aggregate view possible with the new "Hub Site" being developed for SharePoint but I don't know enough about them and thier capabilities when it comes to content aggregation.
I see the potential to build something wholly unmanageable and unscalable if I don't understand how these tools are intended to be used. At the same time, I find the new platform Microsoft is developing to be a very refreshing (if not powerful) change from times past, so I am eager to follow it into the future. Thank you in advance for any feedback provided.
Have you considered using Project Online? You'd have extra licencing costs but it is designed for the management of projects and the people working on them. You'd also gain additional functionality such as time-sheeting meaning that you could more correctly attribute costs to a project.
>but we also cannot make a Group for each project, as we would quickly have hundreds of
>groups with very similar members (but not all the same) leading to chaos and redundancy
I appreciate that this might be scary but for sure a single Group per Project is the intent and ideal for the use of O365 Groups.
- Even if two projects might have exactly the same people working on them? With significant overlap in their lifecycle? I've noticed more work going into the "My SharePoint" site that users get so if there is a good way for individuals to see all of the Sites (Projects/Groups) that they are involved in then I suppose it would not be too chaotic.
Thank you for your response.Remember that with Groups you get the SharePoint Site, Planner, the OneNote, the Calendar, Email, and Teams. All things a project team would want. And you probably want to keep the assets/tasks separate for each Project.
If the players don't change at all and if all they're using is the Documents in SharePoint I could see a rationale for a single SP site for projects and then a set of folders for each project.
