SharePoint Online vs. Microsoft Teams for Project Management and Cross-Site Document Searchability

[Deleted]

Hello:

I am the PMO Senior Manager for a large global CPG company's R&D department.  Note: I am in the business (not IT), and can't get the guidance / options / clarity I need before choosing to implement SharePoint Online or Microsoft Teams for the purposes of 1) equipping my many project teams with a central hub to store, share, retrieve project documents & information AND 2) allowing Google-like (I mean "Bing-like) searchability across all project documents (includes both inflight project or completed projects [archived]), strategy docs, etc.

Currently my group doesn't really have a viable ECM solution in place.....project teams seem to store key project documents on their personal computers and share them with project colleagues through email.  This of course is risky, inefficient, and leads to rework.

My IT department has provisioned me with a brand new clean SharePoint Online site; however, the build will seem to require a significant amount of effort (on my part) to generate 100's of subsites and a nightmare to manage & administer.  The reason I say this is that my R&D group is aligned to 8 pillars (or platforms), 40+ programs (that align to one of the pillars), and 100+ projects (that aligns to one of the programs).  Note: I'd implement Live Tiles or another "Mega Menu" add-on solution to achieve this; however, my IT group won't support SharePoint work that is not "out of the box."

The other option that I just learned about is Microsoft Teams (which apparently has a watered down version of SharePoint specific to each individual Team generated).  The big big big negative that I see with Microsoft Teams is that you cannot search for project documents across private Teams SharePoint sites OR repurpose MS Teams SharePoint sites as SharePoint Online sub-sites.

Do we go with 1) full SharePoint Online (to achieve a single searchable source), 2) full Microsoft Teams (with siloed SharePoint sites that are not cross searchable), or 3) somehow a hybrid of both?

Is anybody else experiencing a similar dilemma?  Any suggestions are welcomed and much appreciated!

-Doug

ddoerhoff@gmail.com

[#2]

You have to see Teams as a Central Hub where you can use out of the box services available in Office 365 (SPO Sites for document management, Planner for Team work) and other external services that allows you to collaborate very fast and get your stuff done quite quickly. SharePoint Online on the other hand is a great collaboration platform that is also right for the scenario you have mentioned and that does not have the search restrictions as you have well described (I can tell you that is expected in the future to be able to search information in private Teams...at leas from the Delve perspective). So if you want to stay focused on your work and use a central hub, then go to Teams...if you want to have a powerful collaboration and document management platform, then go for SPO Sites

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Hi Doug,

Just a clarification - Teams doesn't come with a "watered down version of SharePoint". It sits on top of Office 365 Groups which includes its own document library, but also comes with a fully functional SharePoint site.
The challenge you have is that each Office 365 Group is its own SharePoint site collection, which means it has a unique set of permissions and in your scenario - you cannot easily search across them.

However you can actually search across multiple site collections in one of two ways:
- configure the Enterprise Search Center
- use the Content Search Web Part as it can aggregate content across multiple site collections

Just be aware that Teams is not a solution simply to get you a SharePoint site. Teams is a chat space with a virtually all-in-one UI to access resources from Office 365 Groups - which is where the real functionality comes from.

Based on what you've said from your IT department, I'm taking the guess (without being rude) that they don't know much about these features of Office 365 because if they did they would have been able to answer your question in the first place but also be able to guide you to the correct solution.
I'd suggest looking to engage an external Office 365 specialist (either company or individual like myself) to help you, IT and the broader business understand the different collaboration options.

[#4]

We currently have around 80 project sites in our SP2013 on-prem enviroment under their own 'project' web application. These are used by all project teams. The only issue has been that project communications have tended to be via email which are not captured in the site.

For Office 365, our architecture is to create project sites first as O365 Groups which in turn create a Planner and SharePoint site. This helps to directly connect project group-based conversations with the documents in the SharePoint site. We then add the Group to the Team; the team's channels appear as folders in the Documents library in the linked Group SharePoint site.

[#5]

Loryan,

Thank you so much for the reply!  I agree with everything you said.  Would you possibly be able to provide more insight as to how to configure the Enterprise Search Center from my Sharepoint Online site to be able to search content stored within Teams sharepoint site collections?  I noticed that Enterprise Search Center is an out of the box site template that I can use to generate a subsite with in SharePoint Online, but don't know how to connect it to Teams SP sites.

Thanks again for your response and guidance!

Doug