Office 365 Basics

Hey Florian Maaß,

Probably the easiest way to do this is to not put all the files together in one location like you would a centralized file server.

Instead, take each group and separate out their folders into their own document libraries.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-is-a-document-library-3b5976dd-65cf-4c9e-bf5a-713c10ca2872 - Introduction to the concept of a document library

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-a-document-library-in-sharepoint-306728fe-0325-4b28-b60d-f902e1d75939 - how to create a document library

Let me try to conceptualize this a bit for you. Lets say you have a D:\ Drive from a old file server. In the D drive you have 4 folders, you have HR, Marketing, Managing Director, and IT. In your old file server system, you would just have D:\HR\, D:\Marketing, etc, and would do permissions for each folder. In SharePoint, just take the D drive out of the equation. Instead, create a document library for each one.

So Document Library A would be called HR, Document Library B would be called Marketing, so on and so forth.

The document Library becomes the new central tool that you are using to group your users, rather than a parent folder that existed in the main file servers drive, you move to a document library.

Each document library allows you to create permissions as well as folder tree's, and by default have the ability to inherit or do custom permissions all the way down. So you would start by giving everyone who did have access to the HR folder on your file server, access to the HR document library. So inside the HR document library, you could have many more folders and files, and everyone in HR that has access to that document library by default then has access to all the files throughout the folder structure. (Again if you want to make it more complicated you can break this and do permissions a bit more granularity, but the default is that all permissions are 'inherited" down from the folder above it in document libraries).

For most people this is how they have it setup. You then would just have your users bookmark the URL for the document libraries that they use. When they go to save files in their applications, assuming they are O365 versions of office, they will also have the option to save to these cloud locations. So if I am working on a Word document, I can choose to save the file to the HR document library directly from my word application.

Finally if you have someone who REALLY wants to have the look and feel of the old traditional file server, you can map sharepoint document libraries. This is not really how they are intended to be used, so I would recommend having your users try to use the web interfaces, but so you have the knowledge - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-configure-and-to-troubleshoot-mapped-network-drives-that-connect-to-sharepoint-online-sites-in-office-365-ef399c67-4578-4c3a-adbe-0b489084eabe

Hope this helps!
Adam