SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 1

Episodes in the SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Series Series

  1. SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 1
  2. SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 2
  3. SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 3

We asked you what you wanted to hear about and by an overwhelming margin folks wanted to know about using SharePoint and Teams and our thoughts on when to use each. Of course this elicits the universal consultant response “It Depends”. This topic was so large that we are splitting it up into a few different episodes.

Use Case: Users need to collaborate on content related to a project

In our experience it makes sense to have the business weigh in on this. They are the ones doing the work so listen to them when you are making your decision about where and how to share project related content. If a company is using SharePoint and users are comfortable with it Teams might not make the most sense. If you are already leveraging Teams for other things then working on projects in Teams makes the most sense.

Don’t decide on a solution based on a technology. Focus on a business goal and solve for that. Let the technology enable solving the business goal.

We have seen Teams be most effective for project collaboration in smaller sizes. Usually, teams between 3-20 people. Any less than three you can use OneDrive or individual chat in Teams. Any more than 20 things get a little crazy managing chats and posts. Teams provides the ability do real time collaboration including Chat, Screen Sharing, Voice calls, and Videos.

An important thing to think about is security. In Teams everyone has access to read or edit any document. It’s like a filing cabinet. You are working on a project with someone. You complete a task and put it in the filing cabinet. Someone else can go in the cabinet and see what you have done. If you need granular level permissions you should consider using SharePoint for this content. You could use Private Channels in Teams but that opens up another can of administrative worms as they don’t show up in the Admin Center.

If you are doing mostly asynchronous document collaboration and leveraging versioning and coo-authoring then SharePoint might be your best choice. If you are sharing more communications based content (think one to many) like news SharePoint might be the best choice. You can leverage SharePoint Communication Sites to author and publish the content out to many people.

Resources

Do you have any questions for us? Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskSympraxis and mention @SympraxisC.