File sharing: SharePoint or Teams?

Okay, so one of the number one questions that I get asked about, specifically Microsoft 365, is about storage and how to save files, and how to share files in particular. People get very confused about, and understandably, they get very confused about, “should it be OneDrive that I’m using to share things?” “Should it be SharePoint?” What are the things I should be using?

And the thing to keep in mind is, beneath the whole iceberg of Microsoft 365, everything that’s a file is really being stored in SharePoint. But that doesn’t mean that you need to interact with SharePoint directly, so in OneDrive should be all of your personal type of files. In fact, I really recommend using something called OneDrive KFM, which is “known file move,” it means that everything saved to desktop, to my documents, or even my pictures, actually, it’s synced to OneDrive off into the cloud. That’s extremely helpful when it comes to people wanting to access data from here at their office or over at their home. It makes life really, really great. That underneath the surface is SharePoint, you won’t usually run into that.

Now, people get really confused about: “okay, so my team needs a place to store files, what do we do?” “How do we do that?” “We were told this SharePoint,” and that’s true, but the real big secret is the easy way to work with SharePoint is to use Teams instead. So Microsoft Teams is one of the newer product within within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, but it makes collaboration super, super easy, and everybody can understand and everybody can work with it. And the trick to doing it really well is create teams for everything.

Like, let’s say you’re a church, let’s say that you’ve got an all staff team for like all of your staff; You can also have a team for your elders and your deacons that you invite them in as guests, you can have a team for HR, you can have a team for the children’s ministry, you can have a team for projects… things that you are going to be shorter term like the church camp… these are all things that you should just go ahead and spin up teams for. And every time you do that, it creates a SharePoint site in the back that allows you to save files and things like that directly within teams. And then you can also sync that to desktops, you can access it from mobile devices, it really makes life very, very easy. And the number one tip, like I said, is just allow everybody to create teams for whatever’s going to make sense for them to be able to share files.

Within teams you can also do some other types of file sharing. You can share files in group chats or direct chats, things like that. But the primary way should really be create teams. You can create channels within the teams… just go out there and create as many teams as you need to do for people to collaborate and work together. Alright, I hope that’s helpful. I hope that gives you a good start on how to collaborate within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. If this has been helpful to you, go ahead and leave a like or follow us. If you have any comments or questions go ahead and drop that below and I will look forward to seeing you next week.