Woe is O365: What guides have you found helpful?
February 7, 2023 8:02 AM Subscribe
My smallish office migrated to Office365 just before the pandemic hit. We received zero guidance, no file storage recommendations, and no digital infrastructure. What guides or resources have you found that are most direct and useful?
Since 2020, most of us have managed to get by reasonably well, but not a week goes by that I'm not brutally frustrated by guessing where on earth colleagues chose to share across OneDrive/Sharepoint/Teams and having folks miss important info because no one understands how to set up sharing permissions across departments. We still have an old mapped shared drive which, like a dinosaur, I typically use most often because it works predictably. I've tried to seek out resources on my own for using O365 more efficiently, but I tend to either find 1) incredibly basic info (OneDrive is for you; SharePoint is for sharing!) or 2) very high-level and complex reviews that assume you already have a strong infrastructure and use culture in place. I know I'm not using O365 efficiently, but I resent the guides that present 15 similar but different MS apps and then cheerfully tell you to pick what works best for you. I manage a team of ~12 people and would love to at least build consistent recommendations for my department if my office as a whole won't provide that structure. Our contracted IT support hasn't been of any help. Any leads you can provide would be appreciated.
Since 2020, most of us have managed to get by reasonably well, but not a week goes by that I'm not brutally frustrated by guessing where on earth colleagues chose to share across OneDrive/Sharepoint/Teams and having folks miss important info because no one understands how to set up sharing permissions across departments. We still have an old mapped shared drive which, like a dinosaur, I typically use most often because it works predictably. I've tried to seek out resources on my own for using O365 more efficiently, but I tend to either find 1) incredibly basic info (OneDrive is for you; SharePoint is for sharing!) or 2) very high-level and complex reviews that assume you already have a strong infrastructure and use culture in place. I know I'm not using O365 efficiently, but I resent the guides that present 15 similar but different MS apps and then cheerfully tell you to pick what works best for you. I manage a team of ~12 people and would love to at least build consistent recommendations for my department if my office as a whole won't provide that structure. Our contracted IT support hasn't been of any help. Any leads you can provide would be appreciated.
This page has an overview of OneDrive (personal files) vs SharePoint (Microsoft's built-in solution for team files). However, not all teams which use Office 365 use SharePoint as their solution for shared files. This is a combined tech problem and process issue. The latter is harder in my experience. You have to figure out what exactly is happening now as a baseline.
Setting this up effectively, though, and ensuring people's workstations are optimized for it and security is maintained if there are files which only one part of the team should see, is not necessarily easy to deal with without proper tech support (ask me how I know). I would push more on your tech team on this, with specific questions. Your team may also need more training once decisions are made. Finally, you will want an internal guide explaining to people where they are supposed to put stuff and how to share it, perhaps with links to any necessary online how-tos.
posted by lookoutbelow at 9:09 AM on February 7, 2023
Setting this up effectively, though, and ensuring people's workstations are optimized for it and security is maintained if there are files which only one part of the team should see, is not necessarily easy to deal with without proper tech support (ask me how I know). I would push more on your tech team on this, with specific questions. Your team may also need more training once decisions are made. Finally, you will want an internal guide explaining to people where they are supposed to put stuff and how to share it, perhaps with links to any necessary online how-tos.
posted by lookoutbelow at 9:09 AM on February 7, 2023
Response by poster: Who's making the IT decisions within your organisation?... If there isn't someone on top of all of those things, then you have a much bigger problem than where you personally should be saving your work.
pipeski and lookoutbelow, you're absolutely right that a failure of tech leadership is the crux of my situation. I lead one (non-tech) program area for a nonprofit. My boss and the rest of the executive team don't see this as a problem. We have zero tech support aside from contractors. I'm trying to figure out what is reasonable and workable for me (with no real expertise) to institute within my own team to at least have some bare-bones best practices in place before the situation deteriorates any further.
posted by hessie at 10:25 AM on February 7, 2023
pipeski and lookoutbelow, you're absolutely right that a failure of tech leadership is the crux of my situation. I lead one (non-tech) program area for a nonprofit. My boss and the rest of the executive team don't see this as a problem. We have zero tech support aside from contractors. I'm trying to figure out what is reasonable and workable for me (with no real expertise) to institute within my own team to at least have some bare-bones best practices in place before the situation deteriorates any further.
posted by hessie at 10:25 AM on February 7, 2023
OneDrive, Sharepoint, Google Drive etc. all sound like less-bad choices in the sense that you're less at the mercy of your local shared drive failing.
I don't think the OP is using a local C: drive for storage but a mapped network drive which will be backed up regularly.
Many organisations do a terrible job of arranging shared drives with a structure and permissions that map to the organisational structure or to any short term projects being worked on.
In organisations with dozens of departments, hundreds of teams and millions of documents, reorganising everything into a sensible structure is an impossibly large (and generally thankless) task.
Adding new cloud technology does not magically fix this issue, if anything it makes things worse with even more duplication in multiple places.
If your shared drive works for you, just keep using it. Simple network file storage may be seen as 'old fashioned' but if it ain't broke...
posted by Lanark at 12:12 PM on February 7, 2023
I don't think the OP is using a local C: drive for storage but a mapped network drive which will be backed up regularly.
Many organisations do a terrible job of arranging shared drives with a structure and permissions that map to the organisational structure or to any short term projects being worked on.
In organisations with dozens of departments, hundreds of teams and millions of documents, reorganising everything into a sensible structure is an impossibly large (and generally thankless) task.
Adding new cloud technology does not magically fix this issue, if anything it makes things worse with even more duplication in multiple places.
If your shared drive works for you, just keep using it. Simple network file storage may be seen as 'old fashioned' but if it ain't broke...
posted by Lanark at 12:12 PM on February 7, 2023
Best answer: I do this for work and it's not a tech issue but a people and processes issue. Here's my general strategy for getting people onto a workable system:
1. Inventory what you have. Put up an excel spreadsheet and list all the sharepoint sites, teams, networked drives, shared onenotes, non-Microsoft resources (like a Confluence site one team is using, your team Canva account etc) and basically - where you have shared stuff.
For the sharepoint sites and teams: I would list out the individual libraries on the sites if they're being used by different teams/projects. Remember that every team has its own built-in sharepoint site (the files section is actually a sharepoint site).
2. Add to each item (use separate tabs with tables, pivot if needed) these fields: Who is the ultimate decider for the content here? (Content Owner) Who does the day-to-day management of the item? (Site Owner) Who needs to edit or add to this? (Members) Who needs to just be able to read it? (Visitors)
I usually do a big list of all the people in the team and then make various sensibly-named groups as columns and add a '1' where a person belongs to a group so I can generate an easy list of who belongs to what group.
This is NOT who should do these things - you are inventorying what access there is now.
3. Now you have a sort of picture of what your landscape is. You'll see lots of overlapping areas, information silos and so on. At this point, take a whiteboard and post-it notes (Miro/powerpoint if online) and start diagramming what you have and moving it around to be simpler and more sensible.
Rule of thumb: if you're disorganised, you can consolidate every 10 items to 1 organised.
If you have any widely used corporate system like an email filing system, duplicate that structure where possible - it may be clunky, but people already know it.
Otherwise, put together your own Very Simple naming and filing convention like Division - Project library, we use a Financial Year column to organise the files inside.
(Microsoft really wants people to use custom columns or metadata to organise and if your libraries usually go past 5000 items, you SHOULD - the performance is way better, it becomes easier to sort and search for files etc. But breaking people out of the folder habit is HARD and you will need to have top-down support for your team to make the metadata a required feature which is a speedbump)
Make 2 diagrams in PowerPoint or whatever - what your info landscape looks like now - a big mess - and what you think it should look like.
4. Share the diagram and get feedback and start incorporating that. This is best done in f2f workshops where you literally redraw and move post-its and discuss how you file things and why a wiki is better than OneNote and vice versa. Expect people to get surprisingly upset about how they file.
Also start the workshop by telling everyone a quick refresher of Microsoft terms - what's a SharePoint, what's a networked drive, what's onedrive etc. Be very clear (colour code!) which is which.
Come up with a widely agreed solution. Get as high up support as you can to enforce some rules like: you need a director sign off to create a new team/library. You can only store temporary or personal files in your OneDrive, anything else needs to eb on the official libraries.
My personal pref is to have a shared communication site for the intranet stuff, then to have each division/team have a central teams site that lists all the related sub teams and project sites and other resources on the landing page. I like to have a corporate template that includes a simple lookbook page with the naming conventions for files as a reminder, built in links to a How-To guide for managing access, M365 onboarding etc.
5. Now you gotta make the ideal happen. Build whatever new sites you need, set up the permissions and then - delete whatever you can before you move the stuff over. Close the old things (or set to read-only and chuck on a storage drive).
ShareGate is a great tool although the license fee is high. If you have audit requirements, you will need something like that to keep track of what went where (still always do a comparative filecount - it's not perfect).
The easiest way to migrate to SharePoint Online if you don't have to worry about an audit trail is to set up an empty SPO site with a library per source and move the whole thing over, *then* sort it out to where it should go within SPO. Moving and copying items within an SPO tenancy is far far less painful than getting stuff onto SPO in the first place. But you run the risk of people just using the temporary holding library as the permanent site (we had folders from the last migration... 7 years back)
Migrating is hard and you need to manage people's expectations - there will be times they have to work off their local copies, they'll have to get used to the new system, they'll have to 'waste time' sorting through and deleting old files - it's tedious. But it ABSOLUTELY is worth the effort if you can get people on to one shared platform/system.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 1:08 PM on February 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
1. Inventory what you have. Put up an excel spreadsheet and list all the sharepoint sites, teams, networked drives, shared onenotes, non-Microsoft resources (like a Confluence site one team is using, your team Canva account etc) and basically - where you have shared stuff.
For the sharepoint sites and teams: I would list out the individual libraries on the sites if they're being used by different teams/projects. Remember that every team has its own built-in sharepoint site (the files section is actually a sharepoint site).
2. Add to each item (use separate tabs with tables, pivot if needed) these fields: Who is the ultimate decider for the content here? (Content Owner) Who does the day-to-day management of the item? (Site Owner) Who needs to edit or add to this? (Members) Who needs to just be able to read it? (Visitors)
I usually do a big list of all the people in the team and then make various sensibly-named groups as columns and add a '1' where a person belongs to a group so I can generate an easy list of who belongs to what group.
This is NOT who should do these things - you are inventorying what access there is now.
3. Now you have a sort of picture of what your landscape is. You'll see lots of overlapping areas, information silos and so on. At this point, take a whiteboard and post-it notes (Miro/powerpoint if online) and start diagramming what you have and moving it around to be simpler and more sensible.
Rule of thumb: if you're disorganised, you can consolidate every 10 items to 1 organised.
If you have any widely used corporate system like an email filing system, duplicate that structure where possible - it may be clunky, but people already know it.
Otherwise, put together your own Very Simple naming and filing convention like Division - Project library, we use a Financial Year column to organise the files inside.
(Microsoft really wants people to use custom columns or metadata to organise and if your libraries usually go past 5000 items, you SHOULD - the performance is way better, it becomes easier to sort and search for files etc. But breaking people out of the folder habit is HARD and you will need to have top-down support for your team to make the metadata a required feature which is a speedbump)
Make 2 diagrams in PowerPoint or whatever - what your info landscape looks like now - a big mess - and what you think it should look like.
4. Share the diagram and get feedback and start incorporating that. This is best done in f2f workshops where you literally redraw and move post-its and discuss how you file things and why a wiki is better than OneNote and vice versa. Expect people to get surprisingly upset about how they file.
Also start the workshop by telling everyone a quick refresher of Microsoft terms - what's a SharePoint, what's a networked drive, what's onedrive etc. Be very clear (colour code!) which is which.
Come up with a widely agreed solution. Get as high up support as you can to enforce some rules like: you need a director sign off to create a new team/library. You can only store temporary or personal files in your OneDrive, anything else needs to eb on the official libraries.
My personal pref is to have a shared communication site for the intranet stuff, then to have each division/team have a central teams site that lists all the related sub teams and project sites and other resources on the landing page. I like to have a corporate template that includes a simple lookbook page with the naming conventions for files as a reminder, built in links to a How-To guide for managing access, M365 onboarding etc.
5. Now you gotta make the ideal happen. Build whatever new sites you need, set up the permissions and then - delete whatever you can before you move the stuff over. Close the old things (or set to read-only and chuck on a storage drive).
ShareGate is a great tool although the license fee is high. If you have audit requirements, you will need something like that to keep track of what went where (still always do a comparative filecount - it's not perfect).
The easiest way to migrate to SharePoint Online if you don't have to worry about an audit trail is to set up an empty SPO site with a library per source and move the whole thing over, *then* sort it out to where it should go within SPO. Moving and copying items within an SPO tenancy is far far less painful than getting stuff onto SPO in the first place. But you run the risk of people just using the temporary holding library as the permanent site (we had folders from the last migration... 7 years back)
Migrating is hard and you need to manage people's expectations - there will be times they have to work off their local copies, they'll have to get used to the new system, they'll have to 'waste time' sorting through and deleting old files - it's tedious. But it ABSOLUTELY is worth the effort if you can get people on to one shared platform/system.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 1:08 PM on February 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
Admin access is going to be essential for doing this right as there are so many settings in Sharepoint & Teams that affect the experience.
For example, are there good reasons that the different departments don't already have default shared permission for each others files? Obviously things like HR files need to be confidential, but other settings might just be there by default. Retention settings also matter. Chats in Teams can be set to be retained indefinitely or just a day, and that significantly affects how they can be used. Another feature I actively like is the ability to have MS Teams create transcribed meeting notes, but it's a setting that has to be enabled by an admin.
posted by veery at 1:37 PM on February 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
For example, are there good reasons that the different departments don't already have default shared permission for each others files? Obviously things like HR files need to be confidential, but other settings might just be there by default. Retention settings also matter. Chats in Teams can be set to be retained indefinitely or just a day, and that significantly affects how they can be used. Another feature I actively like is the ability to have MS Teams create transcribed meeting notes, but it's a setting that has to be enabled by an admin.
posted by veery at 1:37 PM on February 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I do this for a living. First, I suspect you’ve come across the MOCA which some people love and some find frustrating. Big take-away is you need to consider how these applications are going to work for your organisation at a strategic level and then socialise this approach and design accordingly.
Someone else has addressed how to approach the information architecture so I’ll chip in on access.
Access and permissions in M365 is needlessly complex. There are settings at tenant level, app level site level and document level to consider.
This means you need to think about a few basic principles for your organisation. Are you open by default and restrict access by exception or restrictive by default and open things by exception? This affects for example whether you choose communication SharePoint sites or teams SharePoint sites. Whether you hubify sites do you can start ti break down siloes
Do you regularly collaborate internally across different departments and externally with other agencies?Therefore this determines whether you turn on guest access in Teams.
To keep access simple try to use access groups as much as possible. Try to use defaults if you can, or design groups around clear boundaries within your organisation. If you have a lot of churn or rotation keep on top of group membership to make sure it is appropriate. Consider requiring site owners to do quarterly checks if this is an issue for you.
There is also a growing issue with SharePoint v Teams as many users are cottoning on to the fact that when you create Teams you get a bunch of stuff (a M365 group, a calendar, etc ) and a SharePoint site. A lot of organisations used to say “go to Teams to collaborate” and “go to SharePoint to save information” but now Teams is gaining more and more SharePoint functionality like columns, views, content types etc
Some clients are now adopting a Teams first environment which means people log into Teams and work there all day. This means though, your Teams channels need to be well designed because these will translate to folders in your underlying SharePoint site.
And if your people struggle with M365 they may need to have it explained to them that members of a Team can see everything in the Team (a blind spot recently encountered jn the wild)
You do need to determine what the purpose of OneDrive is as an organisation. If it’s a local scratchpad or place for drafts you need to socialise this AND disincentivise this as a place to store corporate information (think limits)
Finally you can monitor usage in Purview and Defender, this is more for your info sec and compliance people but I would highly recommend considering whether these applications are sufficient. Licensing matters, you get more on E5 than E3.
posted by BAKERSFIELD! at 12:21 PM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Someone else has addressed how to approach the information architecture so I’ll chip in on access.
Access and permissions in M365 is needlessly complex. There are settings at tenant level, app level site level and document level to consider.
This means you need to think about a few basic principles for your organisation. Are you open by default and restrict access by exception or restrictive by default and open things by exception? This affects for example whether you choose communication SharePoint sites or teams SharePoint sites. Whether you hubify sites do you can start ti break down siloes
Do you regularly collaborate internally across different departments and externally with other agencies?Therefore this determines whether you turn on guest access in Teams.
To keep access simple try to use access groups as much as possible. Try to use defaults if you can, or design groups around clear boundaries within your organisation. If you have a lot of churn or rotation keep on top of group membership to make sure it is appropriate. Consider requiring site owners to do quarterly checks if this is an issue for you.
There is also a growing issue with SharePoint v Teams as many users are cottoning on to the fact that when you create Teams you get a bunch of stuff (a M365 group, a calendar, etc ) and a SharePoint site. A lot of organisations used to say “go to Teams to collaborate” and “go to SharePoint to save information” but now Teams is gaining more and more SharePoint functionality like columns, views, content types etc
Some clients are now adopting a Teams first environment which means people log into Teams and work there all day. This means though, your Teams channels need to be well designed because these will translate to folders in your underlying SharePoint site.
And if your people struggle with M365 they may need to have it explained to them that members of a Team can see everything in the Team (a blind spot recently encountered jn the wild)
You do need to determine what the purpose of OneDrive is as an organisation. If it’s a local scratchpad or place for drafts you need to socialise this AND disincentivise this as a place to store corporate information (think limits)
Finally you can monitor usage in Purview and Defender, this is more for your info sec and compliance people but I would highly recommend considering whether these applications are sufficient. Licensing matters, you get more on E5 than E3.
posted by BAKERSFIELD! at 12:21 PM on February 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
OneDrive, Sharepoint, Google Drive etc. all sound like less-bad choices in the sense that you're less at the mercy of your local shared drive failing. Any local storage needs to have a proper, tested backup strategy if your organisation has any files worth keeping. Your organisation needs to know (i) where all the files are, (ii) who has permission to access them, and (iii) what security is in place to prevent leakage outside your org. If there isn't someone on top of all of those things, then you have a much bigger problem that where you personally should be saving your work.
posted by pipeski at 9:02 AM on February 7, 2023