Microsoft is bad
July 11, 2024 10:53 AM Subscribe
Is it Microsoft, or is it me? Ultimately it doesn't matter: to my shame, I don't understand how to use Teams, Sharepoint, OneDrive, etc to share and store documents.
Guess I'm now old because computers are becoming hard for me. Here are some problems I am having:
- Easily sharing a document across two organizations so that we can both update the same spreadsheet (within Teams? Another way?)
- Understanding how documents are stored in OneDrive
- Understanding the relationship between Teams/Outlook/One Drive
These feel extremely annoying but I have to learn this to be effective at work. Wondering what my options are for becoming more proficient in navigating these applications.
. I'm afraid of taking a general class in like, "How does Microsoft" because it might be excruciatingly basic (I thought I was a very computer literate person until these particular products started throwing me off in the last couple years). My employer does not provide any training in how to use these products in our specific setting.
This question is sad and humiliating but oh well that's the aging process I guess.
Guess I'm now old because computers are becoming hard for me. Here are some problems I am having:
- Easily sharing a document across two organizations so that we can both update the same spreadsheet (within Teams? Another way?)
- Understanding how documents are stored in OneDrive
- Understanding the relationship between Teams/Outlook/One Drive
These feel extremely annoying but I have to learn this to be effective at work. Wondering what my options are for becoming more proficient in navigating these applications.
. I'm afraid of taking a general class in like, "How does Microsoft" because it might be excruciatingly basic (I thought I was a very computer literate person until these particular products started throwing me off in the last couple years). My employer does not provide any training in how to use these products in our specific setting.
This question is sad and humiliating but oh well that's the aging process I guess.
I wonder if you work where I do? :D
1. Think of One Drive as being the cloud backup for your hard drive. When you "set up your OneDrive", select a location on your hard drive that you can reach easily and that is organized usefully. WORK OFF THIS whenever you can. Most people use the Documents folder on their PC.
2. OneDrive will replicate that directory on the cloud, through the web version of OneDrive, so that if your hard drive crashes or you are on a different computer, you can access those files.
3. If you log into Microsoft on a new computer, you can work in the cloud version of OneDrive. Any changes made the Cloud OneDrive OR the hard drive OneDrive will be synced to the other version.
4. If you permanently shift to a new computer, you can have OneDrive download all the files from the cloud into the new OneDrive folder on your new computer.
5. Sometimes there's a delay between saving somethign on your hard drive and having it show up in the web version of OneDrive. You can sometimes force teh sync.
6. You can share files from the web version of OneDrive by right-clicking and selecting Share. Or you can share files the old way by using your hard drive and attaching them to an email.
Teams and SharePoint are... more complicated. Basically SharePoint is the cloud version of a central directory. SharePoint and Teams work together, so that you can store files in a Teams chat which are really somewhere in SharePoint (but might be hard to find). I recommend avoiding sharing things in Teams, and instead point your collaborators to the location in SharePoint, assuming they have access to that directory.
posted by suelac at 11:11 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]
1. Think of One Drive as being the cloud backup for your hard drive. When you "set up your OneDrive", select a location on your hard drive that you can reach easily and that is organized usefully. WORK OFF THIS whenever you can. Most people use the Documents folder on their PC.
2. OneDrive will replicate that directory on the cloud, through the web version of OneDrive, so that if your hard drive crashes or you are on a different computer, you can access those files.
3. If you log into Microsoft on a new computer, you can work in the cloud version of OneDrive. Any changes made the Cloud OneDrive OR the hard drive OneDrive will be synced to the other version.
4. If you permanently shift to a new computer, you can have OneDrive download all the files from the cloud into the new OneDrive folder on your new computer.
5. Sometimes there's a delay between saving somethign on your hard drive and having it show up in the web version of OneDrive. You can sometimes force teh sync.
6. You can share files from the web version of OneDrive by right-clicking and selecting Share. Or you can share files the old way by using your hard drive and attaching them to an email.
Teams and SharePoint are... more complicated. Basically SharePoint is the cloud version of a central directory. SharePoint and Teams work together, so that you can store files in a Teams chat which are really somewhere in SharePoint (but might be hard to find). I recommend avoiding sharing things in Teams, and instead point your collaborators to the location in SharePoint, assuming they have access to that directory.
posted by suelac at 11:11 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]
Would this free Microsoft Knowledgebase article help about Sharepoint and OneDrive?
posted by kschang at 11:31 AM on July 11
posted by kschang at 11:31 AM on July 11
I work in IT at a place that is a mostly-Microsoft house, and I can assure you it is not just you. OneDrive + Teams + SharePoint + Outlook are (IMO) poorly designed and very confusing. Don't get down on yourself if you're finding it difficult.
posted by Ampersand692 at 11:36 AM on July 11 [39 favorites]
posted by Ampersand692 at 11:36 AM on July 11 [39 favorites]
Keep in mind that SharePoint is a SUPER complicated thing that even Microsoft suggests that you hire a consultant to train your company AND customize and implement.
I agree with /u/ampersand692 Microsoft's strategy in this was not cohesive like someone with a full suite of apps designed from the start to work together (something like SAP). The apps are built at different times under different philosophies, different corporate direction, different devs... So they clash a bit.
posted by kschang at 11:42 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]
I agree with /u/ampersand692 Microsoft's strategy in this was not cohesive like someone with a full suite of apps designed from the start to work together (something like SAP). The apps are built at different times under different philosophies, different corporate direction, different devs... So they clash a bit.
posted by kschang at 11:42 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]
A core problem is that most/all of these tools are flexible platforms for people to use to solve their business problems. They are adaptable and configurable to work in different ways to achieve an outcome.
There isn't just one way of doing things.
While that allows the tools to do more things, it does mean they are more confusing to use. Plus, because your colleagues can use the tools in a different way it means their can be clashes when it comes down to collaborating on the same thing. When people work differently it can lead to confusion and chaos and frustrating.
With that said, here goes.
Outlook is personal email and personal calendaring. It is 25+ years old at this point.
SharePoint is a web tool to create sites for "teams" i.e. groups of similiar minded people. It lets you store files and create/update ad hoc lists of things: think real, simple light weight databases. It is 20+ year old at this point with the cloud version of it being ~10 years old.
OneDrive is just a SharePoint site that is just for you. As other mentioned, Microsoft uses this to help backup your computer. It is also used as a place for you to share links to your files rather than emailing copies. It is also used for lots of other things.
Teams is the uber-communication app that centralizes and duplicates other things. It too has the concept of a team or I suppose a Team. A group of people working on a common problem/area. Each of those Teams creates a special SharePoint site for the team along with a special email address for the team. Teams inexplicitly also has a view of your Calendar from Outlook. You can interact with the content stored in these Teams in the Teams user interface or via the SharePoint UI.
Teams was created in response to the popularity of Slack but using things that Microsoft already had so that explains why it is so disjointed.
What we tell people at my enormous Fortune 50 company is that OneDrive is meant for the things that are truly personal to you. Stuff like your career and planning documents, etc. Otherwise, content should be stored in the Team that the content belongs to. If you work in Sales, there should be some Sales Team you belong to that the files go there.
As for should you use the Team UI or the SharePoint UI, personal preference is at play but I would recommend trying to work like your coworkers work.
posted by mmascolino at 11:48 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]
There isn't just one way of doing things.
While that allows the tools to do more things, it does mean they are more confusing to use. Plus, because your colleagues can use the tools in a different way it means their can be clashes when it comes down to collaborating on the same thing. When people work differently it can lead to confusion and chaos and frustrating.
With that said, here goes.
Outlook is personal email and personal calendaring. It is 25+ years old at this point.
SharePoint is a web tool to create sites for "teams" i.e. groups of similiar minded people. It lets you store files and create/update ad hoc lists of things: think real, simple light weight databases. It is 20+ year old at this point with the cloud version of it being ~10 years old.
OneDrive is just a SharePoint site that is just for you. As other mentioned, Microsoft uses this to help backup your computer. It is also used as a place for you to share links to your files rather than emailing copies. It is also used for lots of other things.
Teams is the uber-communication app that centralizes and duplicates other things. It too has the concept of a team or I suppose a Team. A group of people working on a common problem/area. Each of those Teams creates a special SharePoint site for the team along with a special email address for the team. Teams inexplicitly also has a view of your Calendar from Outlook. You can interact with the content stored in these Teams in the Teams user interface or via the SharePoint UI.
Teams was created in response to the popularity of Slack but using things that Microsoft already had so that explains why it is so disjointed.
What we tell people at my enormous Fortune 50 company is that OneDrive is meant for the things that are truly personal to you. Stuff like your career and planning documents, etc. Otherwise, content should be stored in the Team that the content belongs to. If you work in Sales, there should be some Sales Team you belong to that the files go there.
As for should you use the Team UI or the SharePoint UI, personal preference is at play but I would recommend trying to work like your coworkers work.
posted by mmascolino at 11:48 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]
The mnemonic that helped me remember the difference is that Onedrive is for one person, while Sharepoint is shared. At least in the default.
Onedrive files are your private drive unless you specifically share a folder with someone else.
Sharepoint is by default shared with the other people on the Team. But also it is possible to specifically share files from Sharepoint with other people if you add them to the permissions.
posted by larrybob at 11:59 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]
Onedrive files are your private drive unless you specifically share a folder with someone else.
Sharepoint is by default shared with the other people on the Team. But also it is possible to specifically share files from Sharepoint with other people if you add them to the permissions.
posted by larrybob at 11:59 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]
Making it further complicated, if you have a file on your hard drive and add it to Teams using Attach File, it will (I think) upload it to your One Drive in order to enable sharing it.
If you attach a file to Outlook, if it lives in One Drive or SharePoint Outlook will ask you if you want to Share a Link - this will share the live version in OD/SP and any changes that others make to it will be reflected there; or Share as a Copy - this is like attachments of old, where if the recipient opens the attachment it opens a temporary version on their own computer, so any changes they make won't be reflected in the original. They'd have to Save As and email you back the new document.
Given this, I've found the best way to use all four programs is to default to saving everything either in One Drive or SharePoint:
1. Save any personal documents in OneDrive - anything that is unlikely to need input from other people or is private enough that I don't want it in a public folder.
2. Save any collaborative documents or final/reference versions of things in the appropriate SharePoint file structure. Our organization set up the basic folder structure when we first implemented SharePoint and although it's gotten a little messy over time, I know where my things need to go.
3. I hate the webapp versions of Word, Excel, etc so my settings usually default to opening files in the desktop apps.
4. Whenever I am sharing a document with a coworker via Outlook or Teams, I go into the document and click Share -> Copy Link, and paste that link into the email or Teams message. I almost never use Share->Share which brings up a dialog box where you add people's emails and can add a little note. (Sometimes in email I will do the attach file thing and choose Share As Link). That way I know that they are seeing the most recent version and if they make any changes it will be captured in this document.
5. Teams/Outlook will warn you if any of your recipients don't have access to the folder you are trying to share, so if that happens you'll need to follow your own org's policies for changing permissions, or move it to a folder they do have access to. There are also advanced settings when you go to Share-> Copy Link in a document where sometimes you can give someone access in the process of sharing the link with them.
posted by misskaz at 12:13 PM on July 11 [2 favorites]
If you attach a file to Outlook, if it lives in One Drive or SharePoint Outlook will ask you if you want to Share a Link - this will share the live version in OD/SP and any changes that others make to it will be reflected there; or Share as a Copy - this is like attachments of old, where if the recipient opens the attachment it opens a temporary version on their own computer, so any changes they make won't be reflected in the original. They'd have to Save As and email you back the new document.
Given this, I've found the best way to use all four programs is to default to saving everything either in One Drive or SharePoint:
1. Save any personal documents in OneDrive - anything that is unlikely to need input from other people or is private enough that I don't want it in a public folder.
2. Save any collaborative documents or final/reference versions of things in the appropriate SharePoint file structure. Our organization set up the basic folder structure when we first implemented SharePoint and although it's gotten a little messy over time, I know where my things need to go.
3. I hate the webapp versions of Word, Excel, etc so my settings usually default to opening files in the desktop apps.
4. Whenever I am sharing a document with a coworker via Outlook or Teams, I go into the document and click Share -> Copy Link, and paste that link into the email or Teams message. I almost never use Share->Share which brings up a dialog box where you add people's emails and can add a little note. (Sometimes in email I will do the attach file thing and choose Share As Link). That way I know that they are seeing the most recent version and if they make any changes it will be captured in this document.
5. Teams/Outlook will warn you if any of your recipients don't have access to the folder you are trying to share, so if that happens you'll need to follow your own org's policies for changing permissions, or move it to a folder they do have access to. There are also advanced settings when you go to Share-> Copy Link in a document where sometimes you can give someone access in the process of sharing the link with them.
posted by misskaz at 12:13 PM on July 11 [2 favorites]
When you say "A document" do you mean "an office365 document"? Because within the office apps, sharing isn't so bad. You can Share from your office application and get a link and people can collaborate on it. Behind the scenes there is Sharepoint involved, but it isn't very in your face.
If you mean literally _any_ file it gets more complicated.
It also is a little more complicated between companies too. In the Share settings (it is a little gear icon in the Share screen) you may have to change from just your company to Anyone for "Share the link with".
posted by cmm at 12:18 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
If you mean literally _any_ file it gets more complicated.
It also is a little more complicated between companies too. In the Share settings (it is a little gear icon in the Share screen) you may have to change from just your company to Anyone for "Share the link with".
posted by cmm at 12:18 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
Teams is the uber-communication app that centralizes and duplicates other things. It too has the concept of a team or I suppose a Team. A group of people working on a common problem/area. Each of those Teams creates a special SharePoint site for the team along with a special email address for the team.
I guess I should add, my org does not work this way - We had SP before Teams existed, so we don't have a direct connection between chat Teams and our SP file structure. Which is why I said if you try to attach a file in Teams it will try to upload to your One Drive - that's how it works for me but it can depend on the settings in your particular company.
posted by misskaz at 12:18 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
I guess I should add, my org does not work this way - We had SP before Teams existed, so we don't have a direct connection between chat Teams and our SP file structure. Which is why I said if you try to attach a file in Teams it will try to upload to your One Drive - that's how it works for me but it can depend on the settings in your particular company.
posted by misskaz at 12:18 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
misskaz if you don't have Teams in Teams or you are chatting with ad hoc users across your company, Teams will do as you say, upload to OneDrive and share. This is the same behavior that now exists in recent versions of Outlook when you try to email files to people. It will offer to upload the file to your OneDrive and share a link.
posted by mmascolino at 12:22 PM on July 11
posted by mmascolino at 12:22 PM on July 11
I just want to say that the problem is not you - it’s that these things are neither intuitive nor consistently implemented. I would go so far as to argue that everyone in your organization would benefit from 4-5 bullet points listing each service and how/when/where to save files, so that you can get consistency.
In our company, we never share files saved within teams. Too confusing. We share files saved on share point, and use Teams to send a link to the file. Like someone above said: OneDrive is for files for one person, Sharepoint is for files that are shared.
posted by samthemander at 12:29 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
In our company, we never share files saved within teams. Too confusing. We share files saved on share point, and use Teams to send a link to the file. Like someone above said: OneDrive is for files for one person, Sharepoint is for files that are shared.
posted by samthemander at 12:29 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
Nth-ing the sentiment, I will say that my former employer's shift to a pure Microsoft operation (and away from perfectly functional non-MS solutions for cloud storage and wiki and so forth) was actually a major driver in my quitting the job altogether. Down that path lies madness, based on my own decades and decades of experience with grandiose integrated solutions from MS (and much better non-MS targeted solutions that are not integrated). Sorry for the non-constructive comment, and best of luck ....
posted by intermod at 2:50 PM on July 11
posted by intermod at 2:50 PM on July 11
It’s not you*. By the time you get your company’s implementation, and your colleagues use of these Microsoft services… you have played a terrible game of telephone.
When the organization I worked for transitioned its file storage to the cloud, I was also confused. I used YouTube videos and Lynda.com (sorry linked in learning) courses to try to wrap my head around it.
Conceptually you are saving a file in either One Drive (for personal use) or SharePoint (for group use). One way to make a distinction between team use and personal use is, if a colleague left the company your team would likely be at IT’s mercy to access any files saved on that person’s one drive. A properly configured Share Point site won’t have this problem.
Teams is a much more user-friendly way to access documents saved on a SharePoint site. Let’s just say SharePoint can be set up in such a way to be approved for use by government employees. In other words, it is kludgy option from the past century.
You may find it helpful to map a MS Team’s file library to Windows file explorer.
*Kids these days don’t get it either.
posted by oceano at 3:05 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
When the organization I worked for transitioned its file storage to the cloud, I was also confused. I used YouTube videos and Lynda.com (sorry linked in learning) courses to try to wrap my head around it.
Conceptually you are saving a file in either One Drive (for personal use) or SharePoint (for group use). One way to make a distinction between team use and personal use is, if a colleague left the company your team would likely be at IT’s mercy to access any files saved on that person’s one drive. A properly configured Share Point site won’t have this problem.
Teams is a much more user-friendly way to access documents saved on a SharePoint site. Let’s just say SharePoint can be set up in such a way to be approved for use by government employees. In other words, it is kludgy option from the past century.
You may find it helpful to map a MS Team’s file library to Windows file explorer.
*Kids these days don’t get it either.
posted by oceano at 3:05 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
By the way, I recommend to NOT install the Onedrive App, and if you do, don’t let it synchronize every folder on your computer and desktop, only one particular folder that you designate.
Far better is to just use the web version of Onedrive and then only drag and drop into it the stuff you specifically want to put in the cloud.
posted by larrybob at 5:28 PM on July 11
Far better is to just use the web version of Onedrive and then only drag and drop into it the stuff you specifically want to put in the cloud.
posted by larrybob at 5:28 PM on July 11
Teams and OneDrive are built on top of Sharepoint. Teams is a front end for Sharepoint 'Team Sites' with a standard template and a dedicated UI. OneDrive is a personal SharePoint document library mounted as a folder. You can get the OneDrive client to access SharePoint libraries, though I'm not sure how officially supported that is.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:55 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:55 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
From MS:
Overview of Teams and SharePoint integration
this Guide to migrating file shares to OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint is meant for people moving to the cloud from file servers on their office network, but might be helpful for its explanations.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:00 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
Overview of Teams and SharePoint integration
this Guide to migrating file shares to OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint is meant for people moving to the cloud from file servers on their office network, but might be helpful for its explanations.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:00 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]
One thing I don't see anyone else addressing is latke's desire to share documents with people in another organization. To my knowledge, this can't be done, or can only be done with something called federation. My company has mentioned this, and may indeed have federation with some other organizations, but not in my part of the company.
I don't hate Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive. My employer has been a Microsoft shop for a long time. We moved from Zoom (plus the usual MS360 app suite) this spring to Teams/New SharePoint/OneDrive. After a big ransomware incident a few years ago, our old SharePoint system was full of holes, and we're slowly abandoning it, including moving documents from old SharePoint to new.
The hardest part has been understanding the hierarchy of permissions, that a Team has a chat room and a document library, but so do larger and smaller part of the Teams organization, and not everyone has access to everything. At the micro level, you the individual have your own OneDrive. I have chosen to use this instead of my hard drive to store documents. That means everything is on my hard drive, but I ignore the hard drive and just use OneDrive, which means everything is in sync and I can access my files from any computer I'm logged onto, including (if I choose to) my iPhone and iPad. I can give anyone in the organization permission to view or edit these files. When I get a new laptop, my documents will automatically be available.
Above that we have our Team, in our case our department department, about 40 people split into four different subteams. Each one of these subteams is also a Team (in the Teams sense) and has their own "channel" -- kind of like a chat room with benefits. We have it set up so anyone on the larger Team can participate, but it helps keep conversations easily followable and documents conveniently segregated. Each of these channels has its own file library, again available to everyone on the Team. To complicate matters a little bit, every Teams meeting has its own chat room and library as well (in our org, those persist for 100 days). If we want to, we can even use a library for every ad hoc chat we engage in, though I don't think any uses those since, in my company, they only persist for 24 hours.
Above our department is our division. The division has other departments, which may or may not have channels and libraries shared with other Teams (It all depends on the permissions granted). For example, as my department provides support to several other departments, we have a couple of channels that are open to the whole division, and a folder in our library that is available to anyone in the company, but most of our channels and libraries are restricted to us, and upper management.
Finally, there are a bunch of public channels that are available to anyone in the company, and other channels that are restricted by office (because why would an office in the south end of town care about the availability of new jigsaw puzzles or a leaking sink at an office in the north end?).
This all sounds complicated, but in practice it really hasn't worked out badly at all. It took us a month to get permissions, persistence rules, and shared channels worked out, and we had excellent support from our IT people (and our manager, who seems to grok Teams supernaturally). Since then it's all become as natural as can be. The interaction between Teams and Outlook is sometimes a little curious, but the flexibility of interaction has worked out pretty well, we have control over our document libraries like we've never had before, and the online meetings are at least as good as Zoom's, which we'd used since early 2022.
posted by lhauser at 6:03 PM on July 11 [3 favorites]
I don't hate Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive. My employer has been a Microsoft shop for a long time. We moved from Zoom (plus the usual MS360 app suite) this spring to Teams/New SharePoint/OneDrive. After a big ransomware incident a few years ago, our old SharePoint system was full of holes, and we're slowly abandoning it, including moving documents from old SharePoint to new.
The hardest part has been understanding the hierarchy of permissions, that a Team has a chat room and a document library, but so do larger and smaller part of the Teams organization, and not everyone has access to everything. At the micro level, you the individual have your own OneDrive. I have chosen to use this instead of my hard drive to store documents. That means everything is on my hard drive, but I ignore the hard drive and just use OneDrive, which means everything is in sync and I can access my files from any computer I'm logged onto, including (if I choose to) my iPhone and iPad. I can give anyone in the organization permission to view or edit these files. When I get a new laptop, my documents will automatically be available.
Above that we have our Team, in our case our department department, about 40 people split into four different subteams. Each one of these subteams is also a Team (in the Teams sense) and has their own "channel" -- kind of like a chat room with benefits. We have it set up so anyone on the larger Team can participate, but it helps keep conversations easily followable and documents conveniently segregated. Each of these channels has its own file library, again available to everyone on the Team. To complicate matters a little bit, every Teams meeting has its own chat room and library as well (in our org, those persist for 100 days). If we want to, we can even use a library for every ad hoc chat we engage in, though I don't think any uses those since, in my company, they only persist for 24 hours.
Above our department is our division. The division has other departments, which may or may not have channels and libraries shared with other Teams (It all depends on the permissions granted). For example, as my department provides support to several other departments, we have a couple of channels that are open to the whole division, and a folder in our library that is available to anyone in the company, but most of our channels and libraries are restricted to us, and upper management.
Finally, there are a bunch of public channels that are available to anyone in the company, and other channels that are restricted by office (because why would an office in the south end of town care about the availability of new jigsaw puzzles or a leaking sink at an office in the north end?).
This all sounds complicated, but in practice it really hasn't worked out badly at all. It took us a month to get permissions, persistence rules, and shared channels worked out, and we had excellent support from our IT people (and our manager, who seems to grok Teams supernaturally). Since then it's all become as natural as can be. The interaction between Teams and Outlook is sometimes a little curious, but the flexibility of interaction has worked out pretty well, we have control over our document libraries like we've never had before, and the online meetings are at least as good as Zoom's, which we'd used since early 2022.
posted by lhauser at 6:03 PM on July 11 [3 favorites]
You can also share folders within a SP/OD library with designated external users ad hoc if the domain policies allow it. They get some kind of email token; if your org doesn't allow it, that may be because that form of access control isn't compliant/sufficient.
(You can also generate a blind share link, but I would not do that unless you genuinely don't care who accesses the folder, and it's read only.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:16 PM on July 11
(You can also generate a blind share link, but I would not do that unless you genuinely don't care who accesses the folder, and it's read only.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:16 PM on July 11
And here are the MS links for that:
Share OneDrive files and folders
Share SharePoint files or folders
The fancier stuff: Overview of external sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:29 PM on July 11 [2 favorites]
Share OneDrive files and folders
Share SharePoint files or folders
The fancier stuff: Overview of external sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:29 PM on July 11 [2 favorites]
It's Microsoft, not you.
They don't have any ground breaking new product, so they are using feature creep and rebranding on all their old ones to keep getting sales. Every quarter they add more features, prioritizing things that do well during their marketing trials, regardless of if the features are actually useful. This means that their products are increasingly getting more complex and less intuitive.
They want large corporate sales, so their products are increasingly geared towards large organizations making them less use to smaller ones and to the individual user. From their point of view if you have to provide seminars to half a million people to train them how to use their product, it's an improvement, because they will earn income from those seminars. And if they change it in six months so people have to take a new set of seminars and get another Microsoft Certificate, that doubles the profit.
Once upon a time they introduced a word processor and everyone wanted their product. Then they introduced a graphical user interface so people didn't have to enter commands in DOS to do everything so everyone wanted their product. Now you struggle to describe what the hell their product is, and how it is different from their previous product, but their only competition is Apple, which is doing the same feature creep thing, so you are stuck accepting yet another upgrade that worsens functionality.
Microsoft, not you.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:09 AM on July 12
They don't have any ground breaking new product, so they are using feature creep and rebranding on all their old ones to keep getting sales. Every quarter they add more features, prioritizing things that do well during their marketing trials, regardless of if the features are actually useful. This means that their products are increasingly getting more complex and less intuitive.
They want large corporate sales, so their products are increasingly geared towards large organizations making them less use to smaller ones and to the individual user. From their point of view if you have to provide seminars to half a million people to train them how to use their product, it's an improvement, because they will earn income from those seminars. And if they change it in six months so people have to take a new set of seminars and get another Microsoft Certificate, that doubles the profit.
Once upon a time they introduced a word processor and everyone wanted their product. Then they introduced a graphical user interface so people didn't have to enter commands in DOS to do everything so everyone wanted their product. Now you struggle to describe what the hell their product is, and how it is different from their previous product, but their only competition is Apple, which is doing the same feature creep thing, so you are stuck accepting yet another upgrade that worsens functionality.
Microsoft, not you.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:09 AM on July 12
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Some options for getting help:
* Filing tickets with tech support for help with specific tasks (such as sharing between organizations)
* Asking questions in your team’s channel about the organization of files in OneDrive
* Talking to your manager about peer mentorship. The beauty of peer mentorship at your stage is that it’s a two way relationship- you provide career advice and get technical advice in return
posted by shock muppet at 11:03 AM on July 11