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OneDrive vs SharePoint - when should a shared folder in OneDrive be moved to a SharePoint site?
For small teams that don't need all of the overhead of an M365 Group, a Teams Chat group and a shared folder in OneDrive can be a viable solution. As per my post title - when would a Team outgrow On...
- As Pydel mentioned, it's not how many files necessarily. It's who, what and where.
If you think of the files in the traditional paper filing cabinet sense, what does that look like? Does each person on the team have their own filing cabinet, and everyone shares a little with all the others? Do I have to remember that Sally has one file I want, Bill has another, and John has yet another? Each one of them would then have to share with the individuals on the team, and each individual would have to remember where everything is. SharePoint allows for that one-stop location, without loss of business continuity when team members leave or new ones join.
you can overcome some of this by picking one person that stores all of the files in a single location, and then shares with the team, but what happens when that person leaves? For a team, solely using OneDrive has the potential of being an organizational nightmare.
Check out Matt Wade's jumpto365 where he answers what to use when
https://www.jumpto365.com/blog/which-tool-when-sharepoint-onedrive-or-microsoft-teams
Good luck
What is the perceived overhead of an M365 group? Do users have to request them via your IT helpdesk or can they just create them? Either way, setting up a Group or Team should be straightforward and should not be a barrier.
To answer your questions, I would advise very limited use of OneDrive sharing. You outgrow OneDrive as soon as you share a file with more than one person. Basically all I use it for is when I have prepped some personal development or HR data and want to share it with one person, e.g.: line manager or HR officer.
As soon as the purpose for that sharing is collaboration/project/team work of any sort then OneDrive becomes sub-optimal. Teams or SharePoint should be the norm, so the "line in the sand" should really be when do you even create a file in OneDrive 😉
- I've come across some situations where the client's IT department charges other departments for the creation and maintenance of M365 Groups. Not a common practice, but it's out there.
With practices like that, I started thinking about how many other working-groups may be dependent on Chat and OneDrive for collaboration. While asking myself "how can we best set them up for success without SharePoint and Team channels?" and "Where do we draw the line?".
Don't get me wrong, I always push for SharePoint for group collaboration. But when the client pushes back with "we need to use (or prefer) chat" then I want to be able to help them understand how to make it work, and educate them on when/how it will stop working.Fair enough... it's still hard to quantify the number of files or users though. The main pain point usually occurs in access management, e.g.,
- someone new joins the project and needs access in John's OneDrive but John is on vacation
- John accidentally shared a file with the wrong person and InfoSec has no idea and no audit trail,
- or John has left the company but all the files are in his OneDrive 😮
Just the productivity loss caused by these incidents is greater than the overhead of setting up a Team, so if the client insists they need to know they are operating at risk.
