Blog - Information on-demand

Staying up-to-date with the latest information from our professionals, business and Microsoft.

Where does SharePoint fit into your use of Teams?



01256 976 650



ElysianIT Limited

Upper Farm, Wootton St. Lawrence,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG23 8PE



info@elysianit.com

The past year has seen an explosion of communication and collaboration tech adoption. With Microsoft Teams, being one of the most powerful real-time, chat-based collaboration tools available to organisations, many rapidly adopted it without necessarily understanding how it strategically fits and aligns with existing solutions, such as SharePoint.

Both Microsoft SharePoint and Teams share so much in common that it’s important to understand how they’re related, how they integrate, and how to best use them.

Many don’t realise that these two tools share much of the same plumbing, as it’s SharePoint that actually underpins both. So, every Teams channel has a SharePoint team site and every SharePoint team site has a Teams channel. So it’s understandable that with this level of tight technical integration it’s no wonder that organisations can be confused which of these solutions to adopt and why.

So, let’s clarify the technologies in play here and cover how best to strategically use them to the best business advantage.

Microsoft Teams - overview

Primary User: Team
Primary Use: Real-time Communication
Great for: Project-oriented teams to have a conversation, work together in files, call, and meet right where the work is happening. Teams can be public (open to anyone in your organization) or private (managed membership).

As you’ll know, Microsoft Teams enables you to communicate through threaded and persistent chat, keeping everyone in the know. You can privately chat with any contact, or project team, even when individuals are offline. With persistent conversation history, you can start and continue exchanges at any time. Use private chat to co-author documents in real-time and to continue collaborating after a call. You can even pin important chats for easy retrieval.

Microsoft Teams, aligns all forms of communication to people related to a topic. This has a number of benefits:

When you’re focused on a task, everything you need is likely to be in the same place: messages, meetings, notes, documents, are all together, along with immediate real-time access to teammates who are online.

You can work in-the-open, eliminating the need for extra emails. For example, when you upload a document to Teams, a notification is automatically shown in the channel so everybody knows about it; no need to send an email announcement, or an email asking where the document is.

The team can have a conversation right in the channel about the information there, eliminating the need to send links to information into Outlook or worse, to attach duplicate copies!

So, with this powerful flexibility, and the ability to store and collaborate on shared files why would you require a separate SharePoint solution?

Microsoft SharePoint - overview

Primary User: Team, Group, Organisation
Primary Functionality: Document Management/File storage
Great For: Storing files in the cloud and sharing them with your team or organization, using robust permission management. Share files with your team, organization, and external users.

If you operate an organisation that has multiple locations or is departmentalised in structure, it can be difficult to make sure that every employee has instant access to the same business intelligence and mission-critical documents they need. Microsoft SharePoint is incredibly versatile and responsive, helping to unite organisations and break down department silos, by ensuring that there is a single source of truth and information.

SharePoint leads the way for modern document management and collaboration though the ability for storing files in the cloud and making them accessible to a broad audience. However SharePoint is more than documents, libraries and lists – with a dedicated ecosystem of development and 3rd party apps, its an ever evolving solution to be enhanced or adapted meeting your specific needs.

Here’s just a few of the out-the-box SharePoint features:

Document version controls tracking every single edit made to a document, along with the time it occurred and the person responsible.

Workflows designed to automate processes and more, to simplify business functions.

Control and manage business-critical information in an effective secure manner, ensuring organisations maintain regulatory compliance.

Build attractive, interactive site pages to organize information, post news, provide contact information, and provide navigation to documents, media, and other types of information.

Create dynamic and interactive organizational charts through visual representations of your whole organisations structure. Detailing each person’s role with the greater team and, if required, the ability to click on individuals to reveal their current availability.

In Summary, with its ability to integrate conventionally separate applications such as intranets, workflow management, content management, business intelligence, and even enterprise social networking, SharePoint is a smart investment for any organisation, regardless of size. Microsoft SharePoint is an organisation’s golden ticket to improved operations and functionality across the board. The efficiencies you’ll realize within your in-house teams alone are enough to make the return well worth the investment.

If you’d like to discuss how SharePoint can help transform your organisation or the benefits of migrating an on-premise solution to the cloud, request a call-back from one of our experts and we’ll talk you through the options available.