SharePoint teams Vs Desktop Teams confusion

[Jim Ryan]

Office 365 E3 account.

I have a Team called the IT Team with 7 members.  If I go to our company SharePoint site and select the IT team I am brought to another SharePoint team site.  Within this site, which shows the same 7 members, I go to Documents and see a number of files and folders.

However, if I launch the Teams desktop site, which has the same 7 members, and go to Files, I have a completely different set of files.  In fact these files appear to be the same ones that are in my OneDrive folder.  Can we not use the desktop app for this?  None of this makes any sense.  No idea what I would get if I loaded the mobile app.

Can anybody explain this too me?

[#2]

Your Files tab on the left is just an app to help put all your files in a single location from multiple sources that can be quickly accessed from within Teams. You need to actually go to "Teams" app on the left rail and under the IT Team, each channel has a files tab on it, that is a folder that matches to the SharePoint site you were talking about Documents library.

Teams stores files for each channel in a folder named after the channel etc.

Hopefully this clears up how this works.

[#3]

Thanks Chris,

So in the app, under The IT Team, with Teams selected on the far left, I have 2 channels, General, and Security, Selecting the files tab on the right for each one shows no files. This was why I went to the Files selection on the far left. I would think they would call it the same in both the app and the SharePoint site, not Files on one and Documents on the other. Nonetheless, I don't find the same files in the app.

[#4]

@Jim Ryan The channels in the app map to folders in the SharePoint site, so from the General Channel's Files tab you will see the contents of the General folder.

[#5]

I see, thanks.  But I have to say, that is kind of half-assed.  Why could they not have the Team SharePoint site match the app?  This is yet another gripe I'm going to get from the users as to why they don't want anything to do with SharePoint.  The layout of most of the apps in 365 match between the web and the desktop.  Sure, not exactly, but at least when you arrive at a site you can easily figure it out.  But never Sharepoint, that is always a PITA.

Thanks for the help though.

[#6]

It does match the app......if you want a link to the root library or another library then create a tab for it or add cloud storage to the files tab and pick the root library or other library.

If you aren’t seeing the general folder on your regular sharepoint site then you have two different sites setup and the team didn’t get created onto the same site your expecting.

[#7]

OK, I should have been clearer. I do see the General Folder and the Security folder on the SharePoint site. But they are under the Documents folder. My expectation is that I would see the channels either in the root on the left or under a section called "Channels"

[#8]

This is what I see:

DesktopSharepoint

[#9]

That's expected behavior. The channels will be updated soon to have an icon over them showing that they are Teams channels, but Office 365 groups uses that same Default document library for documents on all the products, it's just not Teams. What I've done in the Past is rename the default library to "Teams Documents" and then created another library for the department documents. But most people have no issues just using Teams to store their documents and referring to the library for those.

[#10]

Hmmm, OK, I guess so. To make them match I want to rename "Documents" on the left on the SharePoint site to "Channels". Is there a way to do that?

[#11]

Yes, just go into documents on SharePoint, click the cog in the top right > Library Settings > Name and description and rename it. Keep in mind, that any other tools like Planner, will save documents into the channels folder as well since it's the default library for the 365 group. But if that won't be used or people won't be looking outside of Planner for the documents it probably won't be an issue.

Anyway, once renamed it should update the quick launch title on the left, if not you'll need to edit it directly by clicking edit > Edit under the menu, but renaming should change it. Then you can create another Library for Documents etc. For your document storage.

[#12]

Nice! That worked.  I think for the purposes of this site this will work.  Great help, I appreciate it.