MS Teams File Management vs Sharepoint

[FawadAli]

My organization is trying to simplify and standardize its Project Management processes and use MS Teams for collaboration and work in process (WIP) document control. We will move our final project files to a secure location when ready for client submission (Primavera Unifier). 

The challenges we are facing is that currently, there is no root level for a Team file folder, only corresponding channels have a folder. Also, the document management features are light in comparison with Sharepoint. I read in other posts that there were improvements coming to MS Teams document management but I cannot find any detailed information. 

1. Can someone share these details or link to the specific improvements?

2. Does anyone know if there is a way to setup a Team level root folder with all of the channels as folders in that root folder? 

3. I am also eager to hear from the community on best practices for document control in MS Teams and whether Teams is actually the best place for this?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@FawadAli 

1. The first wave of improvements is already here, there has been suggesting that they are working on adding the ability to define metadata which is a bit of an omission at this point. More or less other SharePoint features are now available.

2. Why? There is something coming to give you a breadcrumb in the files view to get back up to the top level. You can use the Add Cloud Storage today to add a virtual directory to link to the root. I would generally just suggest using channels, and navigate there to find your conversations and files.

3. In general we are moving away from older concepts of document management, many things just happen automatically like versioning, automatic classifiers, and new Syntex for tagging and organisation. In general we just plan and configure then allow the platform to do the work.

[#3]

@Steven Collier 

Thank you for your input Steven.

Regarding your question around why, simply put, it is for organization. As a project manager that is responsible for overall scope, it is more efficient to be able to have a single point of entry into all documentation related to the project similar to an explorer/sharepoint root folder. 

Does anyone else have any best practices or process standardization for their respective organizations around Teams file management?

[#4]

Each Team creates a group, which I am sure you know, so bringing a root to all of those is pretty difficult. Not impossible, as you could use a flow to populate a central SP library somewhere. If it is only a Team, you could hack it with displaying the document library in a tab in a channel. Or using cloud storage, as was said before. But just as SP is going flat, Teams at the project level is pretty flat too. Document and metadata control is pretty difficult. Teams really is a collaboration space for conversations and collaborations. There isn't a root per se in available in Teams itself. My suggestion for your organizing/accessing all is to use the SP site to access files. Other people don't really need it, since they likely are working in channels.