The most efficient way to share documents?

[Alex Dunn]

Hi,

My company and I are relatively new to SharePoint Online, and we are looking for the best way to set up sharing documents with Document Libraries. We moved from Box.com, so the team is quite unfamiliar with SharePoint's features and limitations.

Essentially, due to the nature of the company, we have a central 'server' of files and folders. Team members generally work within this structure and do not make their own folders. At the moment, we made the mistake of using the administrator account to hold all of the files in OneDrive, and share the relevant folders to each user, which they access in the 'Shared' tab. However, this setup is not ideal and the team are not at all happy with the confusing interface (when clicking through to files in the administrator's OneDrive, they see a different layout, as well as an unorganised 'Shared' tab). I figure we must be doing something wrong. 

One requirement my company has is quite specific access permissions. However, in the one SharePoint site we currently have, we have some issues. Say if I had the structure Projects -> Client A -> 2018 -> Project A and provided a team member access to just 'Project A', they are unable to see it in SharePoint without the direct URL. There must be another way to set it up.

Ideally, the team would like a 'server'-like behaviour (as if the files were stored on a NAS, for example), in which they can navigate through the entire folder structure in an organised way.

So my question is, how do companies typically set up SharePoint? What are the best practices?

Thanks.

[#2]

Hi Alex!

That was a difficult question and the answer is "It depends" :)

There is no silver bullet for how to implement SharePoint. Depending on what your needs are there are different answers. When i use SharePoint now is often for

Intranets and then i set up Communication Sites for news publishing and common internal document sharing.

When it comes to "Project sites" i prefer to use Microsoft Teams. When You create a team, there will also be created an Office 365 Group and a SharePoint Site. The team members have access to everything in the team (and its SharePoint site) so if You, like You mention, have very specific access restrictions it can be difficult to handle that with/in Teams.

If your access restrictions are very specific You can handle the access in many levels using SharePoint (Site Collection, Site, Library, folders, items). My advice is to handle the access on an as high level as possible, otherwise it gets messy very soon.

Using SharePoint for Project Sites and Site- and Document Sharing with both Internal and External users i recommend that You split them between Internal and External Site Collections ( this is the "old way") so that You have "Internal Projects" and "External Projects", then You can configure the internal site collections so that their subsites and their content are not possible to share with external users by accident. Have You considered using Office 365 Groups?

Regardless of what You choose to use it takes a great deal of planning in advance. If you go for classic SharePoint i recommend that you start by reading "SharePoint Online Planning Guide for Office 365 for business" but based on the needs i think You have the best solution for You is to use Microsoft Teams/Office 365 Groups.

Hope that this helped You a little instead of making You confused on a higher level.

Best regards and good luck, Magnus

[#3]

To put it (very) simply: OneDrive for Business is the cloud "equivalent" of a local "Documents" folder and so it is meant to store the personal work files and folders of a user.

Hence, yes, you made a big mistake... Most (perhaps all!) of your problems come from such mistake!

Instead, the cloud "equivalent" of a network share is a SharePoint document library which is meant to store the files and folders shared among the users in a team.

All this said, you should realize that SharePoint is a quite complex environment, designed to fulfill hugely different requirements in several different ways: therefore a perfect understanding of your requirements and a perfect understanding of alternatives in implementation is paramount. 

A lot depends on your permissions requirements: do you want that everyone is able to access everything? Do you want to share with external users, i.e. not belonging to your organization?

Also, do you need only files and folders sharing or do you need some wider type of collaboration? In such case, Teams/Groups could be the correct answer.

All these subjects, and many more, have been repeatedly discussed in this community, so my advice is to search for relevant threads and read a lot. Or look for a SharePoint professional that can help you.

In any case, planning is the key.

Good luck!

[#4]

Thank you for your answer! I realise now that yes, placing the files on OneDrive was a huge error.

I would really like to set up a SharePoint Document Library/multiple libraries for my team. However, with the access permissions required, I am not too sure what the best way of doing so is.

Essentially, all of the company files are organised into one main folder with many subfolders. For example, heading to 'Clients' would then need you to click on the specific client, then the year, then the project. Within that project folder, there are plenty of subfolders too. External users will rarely access files, and when doing so, will do so with a direct link.

The setup that we desire is quite specific. At any given time, one team member may have access to just two client project folders.

The issue I have found with placing the entire 'server' into a document library is that when sharing a specific subfolder with a team member, they are unable to view it unless using the direct URL. I have been told that this is how SharePoint works, and there is no way to allow them to navigate through parent folders to see what they have been given access to.

How would you recommend proceeding?

[#5]

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. At the moment, my team love using SharePoint as a company intranet (we have one main SharePoint site with news posts, client contact info etc.), and they desire that the documents are all held in one place.

Please could you explain a little further about the Internal / External site collections? However, I will hardly ever be sharing documents to external users

I will take a look at the links.

Thanks.