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SharePoint or Teams, or both? Everything You Need To Know
Choosing the Right Tool for Your Business
In the digital era, effective collaboration and streamlined communication are vital for business success. Microsoft offers an array of powerful tools to facilitate this, including Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. While both have overlapping features, they each serve distinct purposes, and their selection should be aligned with your unique business needs. In this blog post, we’ll explore when to use Teams and when SharePoint is the optimal choice, peppered with insightful facts and the assistance Convverge, a trusted Microsoft Solutions Partner, can offer.
Microsoft Teams: A Hub for Teamwork
Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaboration platform designed to enhance communication and cooperation in a more casual, conversational style. If your business requires constant, real-time collaboration and interaction between team members, Teams is an excellent fit. Teams’ functionalities extend beyond chat; it includes video meetings, file sharing, and integration with other Microsoft 365 apps.
In fact, as per Microsoft’s Q2 2021 earning report, Teams now has over 115 million daily active users, demonstrating its effectiveness as a collaboration tool.
Teams is particularly beneficial for remote or dispersed teams who need a virtual workspace for ongoing communication and collaboration. Additionally, Teams’ capabilities of integrating numerous Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) apps within one platform can consolidate your workflows, enhancing productivity.
SharePoint: A Platform for Content Management
SharePoint, on the other hand, is a web-based collaborative platform that excels in document management and storage system. SharePoint is more structured, designed to facilitate the creation, storage, and control of documents, making it ideal for content management.
Interestingly, SharePoint isn’t just used by businesses; a report from NetMarketShare indicates that SharePoint is used by over 50% of Fortune 500 companies, showcasing its versatility and reliability.
SharePoint is perfect when you need a centralized location to store, organize, share, and access information from any device. For example, you can create a company-wide intranet on SharePoint, allowing employees to access corporate news, policies, HR resources, etc., in one secure, structured, and easily accessible location.
Teams and SharePoint: Better Together
While Teams and SharePoint serve distinct purposes, they are not mutually exclusive. Teams are built on SharePoint technology, meaning every file shared via Teams is stored in SharePoint. For instance, when you create a team in Teams, a new SharePoint site is automatically created in the background. This integration means your team can communicate and collaborate in Teams while utilizing SharePoint’s robust file storage and document management capabilities.
Where to Share Documents: OneDrive, Teams, or SharePoint?
When it comes to sharing documents within the Microsoft ecosystem, the three primary options are OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint. Understanding when and where to share files is vital for effective collaboration. Here are Microsoft’s best practices for sharing documents:
OneDrive for Business: OneDrive is your individual storage space in the Microsoft ecosystem. Consider it your personal library for documents and files. It’s the perfect solution for storing drafts or personal documents that are not ready for sharing or not intended to be shared.
When you do want to share a document from OneDrive, it’s best suited for one-to-one sharing or for small-scale collaborations. After the document is finalized, you might want to move it to SharePoint or Teams for broader access if required.
Microsoft Teams: Teams is the place for teamwork and dynamic collaboration. If you’re working on a document that requires active collaboration with team members, Teams is an excellent place to share it. In Teams, you can co-author documents in real time, chat about them, and keep everything related to a specific project or team in one place.
When you share a document in a Teams’ channel, it’s stored in the Files tab, which is actually part of a SharePoint site that’s created automatically when the team is set up. Hence, a document shared on Teams is inherently stored in SharePoint, benefiting from SharePoint’s powerful document management capabilities.
SharePoint: SharePoint is intended for wider, more structured document sharing and management. If your document is part of a company-wide project, is a resource for the whole organization, or needs to be securely controlled, it belongs on SharePoint. SharePoint’s robust permissions and versioning controls make it perfect for official, company-wide documents.
SharePoint also shines when dealing with metadata and workflows for documents. If your documents need to follow a specific process or if you need to categorize and filter documents based on custom metadata, SharePoint is the way to go.
In summary, use OneDrive for individual and small-scale collaborations, Teams for team-based collaboration, and SharePoint for larger-scale, structured, or organization-wide document sharing and management. Microsoft has designed these tools to work together, so don’t hesitate to use them in combination, depending on your unique business needs.
Choosing between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint can be challenging as it ultimately depends on your unique business requirements. Here’s where Convverge comes in. As a trusted Microsoft Solutions Partner, Convverge can help analyze your business needs, guide you through the capabilities of each platform, and implement the optimal solution that enhances your team’s collaboration and productivity.
Don’t wait to improve your collaboration and communication. Contact Convverge today and explore the potential of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to empower your business. Leverage Convverge’s expertise to ensure your business is making the most of Microsoft’s powerful collaboration tools.
