Collaboration with 365

[OllieC]

Every time I go to play with setting up some kind of collaboration service in 365; whether it be small scale or whole-school I get frustrated and walk away. The eco-system is like a thousand developers vomited every idea on to a live platform. Sharepoint, Yammer, Staff Hub, Teams, Groups, Planner (and countless others I'm sure) - all of these discrete/indiscreet tools, each with hundreds of additional bits of complexity and caveats (new/old sharepoint experience?).

 

Microsoft feels so much like a rudderless ship in this area and it makes setting anything meaningful up a total minefield; for one I feel like any energy put in to this will be wasted because they surely can't keep on with all of these separate overlapping bits and pieces forever?

 

So in short, what's your experience? What is working/what's not?

 

In the short-term, I'd like to improve communication and organisation within my own team - we already use a shared OneNote for documentation; I'd like to extend this to slack-like communication and shared calendar and job allocation/tracking (to supplement, not replace our helpdesk). I'd love to be able to replicate this to other areas such as facilities, science tech, admin etc if successful within my own team.

 

Longer term, I'd like to implement a whole-school portal for staff and students (wouldn't be end of the world if these ended up being separate), where notices, policies, handbooks, briefings, calendars, notices, alerts, documents can be shared (with the relevant groups of people) centrally. I suspect this would be SharePoint but for all I know one of the umpteen other systems that they offer may do this better/tailor SP functionality to this task better.

 

As part of this, I'm eyeing up migrating our staff shared area to SharePoint, but cautious of having the exact opposite to the desired effect of saving storage in school - thousands of downloaded (and duplicate downloaded) files sitting in user areas. Not sure I'm confident enough in OneDrive mapper yet to avoid this issue.

 

Has anyone wrangled this forty-headed beast and won?

 

Thanks

[MrKJLS]

Every time I go to play with setting up some kind of collaboration service in 365; whether it be small scale or whole-school I get frustrated and walk away. The eco-system is like a thousand developers vomited every idea on to a live platform. Sharepoint, Yammer, Staff Hub, Teams, Groups, Planner (and countless others I'm sure) - all of these discrete/indiscreet tools, each with hundreds of additional bits of complexity and caveats (new/old sharepoint experience?).

 

Microsoft feels so much like a rudderless ship in this area and it makes setting anything meaningful up a total minefield; for one I feel like any energy put in to this will be wasted because they surely can't keep on with all of these separate overlapping bits and pieces forever?

 

So in short, what's your experience? What is working/what's not?

 

In the short-term, I'd like to improve communication and organisation within my own team - we already use a shared OneNote for documentation; I'd like to extend this to slack-like communication and shared calendar and job allocation/tracking (to supplement, not replace our helpdesk). I'd love to be able to replicate this to other areas such as facilities, science tech, admin etc if successful within my own team.

 

Longer term, I'd like to implement a whole-school portal for staff and students (wouldn't be end of the world if these ended up being separate), where notices, policies, handbooks, briefings, calendars, notices, alerts, documents can be shared (with the relevant groups of people) centrally. I suspect this would be SharePoint but for all I know one of the umpteen other systems that they offer may do this better/tailor SP functionality to this task better.

 

As part of this, I'm eyeing up migrating our staff shared area to SharePoint, but cautious of having the exact opposite to the desired effect of saving storage in school - thousands of downloaded (and duplicate downloaded) files sitting in user areas. Not sure I'm confident enough in OneDrive mapper yet to avoid this issue.

 

Has anyone wrangled this forty-headed beast and won?

 

Thanks

We are currently using SharePoint for this. We are going to be getting the Cloudbox Design stuff in september to make it look more pretty and do more teaching and learning stuff with Sharepoint, Teams and whatever else is in 365.

 

We are also planning to migrate our staff shared into Sharepoint (at the secondary). One of the primaries we look after done this on their own back and they love it, they also have a sharepoint homepage. Which we customized to what they wanted.

[OllieC]

How well does the SP staff share work? Are you mapping it as a drive or just accessing through browser?; are you ending up with hundreds of downloaded files sitting in user areas cluttering things up?

[TechMonkey]

I'm not going to claim we have won but I think we do all right.

 

As a department we use Teams to bring everything together. This has our IT documents (also accessible via SharePoint), IT OneNote, IT Planner and a our chat channel. This works well. Everything can be accessed separately but this is a great way to tie it all together. This is where we are encouraging everyone to head towards and felt it only right to be the guinea pigs and 'eat the dog food' as the saying goes.

 

As a School we are using a Shared documents on SharePoint. We are still in the process of migrating fully to this so still have an onsite shared area, but this is locked to read only. We do use SharePoint as our Staff portal. It is our Intranet, first page they get when they open Chrome and has all important links and where everyone is directed to go to. It is out external address for staff and where they have to go to get if they want to work remotely. Everything is starting to revolve around it.

 

The big winner is having mapped drives to your shared areas. I have been told this is possible to automate with the OneDrive client via GPO but we haven't got it working. It is also possible to script it but this felt like a backwards step so haven't gone that way yet. So currently we are using Cloud Drive Mapper. This means staff work how they are used to in Explorer and don't end up, like you say, with a million copies in their Downloads folder. Don't forget though that if they are using Office 2016 and above Office documents will be opened from SharePoint so it won't get downloaded, unless they choose to.

 

Next step it is to go native and make the OneDrive client work for shared drives and I will be (fairly) happy.

 

Can't disagree at your vomit analogy though. MS seems to be just throwing as much as possible at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. There is so much overlap in some of the applications that it is hard to know what to use. If I want to communicate in O365 should I Yammer, Teams or use Kaizala? I hear the same from MSPs, MS is just producing stuff and then asking them how customers want to use it.

[MrKJLS]

How well does the SP staff share work? Are you mapping it as a drive or just accessing through browser?; are you ending up with hundreds of downloaded files sitting in user areas cluttering things up?

At our main site, we use IamCloud to map users OneDrives onto the computers. (Which also can map Sharepoint drives). Everything is planned to to be permission controlled using AD Groups for the SharePoint site.

 

But, at the primary they are using it though the web browser and they seem happy enough doing this as they were sharing resources using OneDrive. As above, this is permission controlled.

Edited July 22, 2019 by MrKJLS

[techie17]

I'm not going to claim we have won but I think we do all right.

 

As a department we use Teams to bring everything together. This has our IT documents (also accessible via SharePoint), IT OneNote, IT Planner and a our chat channel. This works well. Everything can be accessed separately but this is a great way to tie it all together. This is where we are encouraging everyone to head towards and felt it only right to be the guinea pigs and 'eat the dog food' as the saying goes.

 

As a School we are using a Shared documents on SharePoint. We are still in the process of migrating fully to this so still have an onsite shared area, but this is locked to read only. We do use SharePoint as our Staff portal. It is our Intranet, first page they get when they open Chrome and has all important links and where everyone is directed to go to. It is out external address for staff and where they have to go to get if they want to work remotely. Everything is starting to revolve around it.

 

The big winner is having mapped drives to your shared areas. I have been told this is possible to automate with the OneDrive client via GPO but we haven't got it working. It is also possible to script it but this felt like a backwards step so haven't gone that way yet. So currently we are using Cloud Drive Mapper. This means staff work how they are used to in Explorer and don't end up, like you say, with a million copies in their Downloads folder. Don't forget though that if they are using Office 2016 and above Office documents will be opened from SharePoint so it won't get downloaded, unless they choose to.

 

Next step it is to go native and make the OneDrive client work for shared drives and I will be (fairly) happy.

 

Can't disagree at your vomit analogy though. MS seems to be just throwing as much as possible at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. There is so much overlap in some of the applications that it is hard to know what to use. If I want to communicate in O365 should I Yammer, Teams or use Kaizala? I hear the same from MSPs, MS is just producing stuff and then asking them how customers want to use it.

 

Just out of interest, how do you structure Teams? Do you separate by Departement etc? Would you have any screenshots to share as I’m struggling to get my head around Teams somewhat?

[jslate1980]

We use teams per class, like a class site using SDS to create the structure.

[techie17]

I’m not sure the best way of structuring ours as we are a MAT and have 5 schools plus the Central Services team (HR, Finance etc). I don’t want it ending up a mess and being really clunky.

[HPlum78]

So a few pointers that I think may help here, and based on my own experience setting up and using Teams.

 

Set out your service and life cycle policy's for your Teams service. You should include things like a Team needs to meet a certain naming convention, it must have a primary and secondary owner at all times, the data that is allowed to be stored and the deletion policy. Make sure that you outline what happens to any data stored within a team at the end of its life cycle. And above all be sure to not use it as a definitive document library.

 

Do not mandate what can be a team as teams are organic and its not down to you as an IT department to mandate its use or how it is used. By that I mean what you are going to classify as a Team on behalf of your organisation. Your users should be able to make a Team for finance as well as make a Team for a project that the finance team are working on. (Don't limit Teams to your organisational structure, is what i am saying here)

 

After all that is defined you can then script the creation of teams we let users do this via our help desk and use Flow to pull the details from the request. We then have scripts that manage the life cycle checking for the number of owners and after a period of time mailing the owners and asking if the team is still required and the likes. The creation scripts also check if they meet the naming convention and don't have any banned words in them so on...

 

Also a note to the op MS have what seems to be an ever growing product portfolio and those do overlap some of this is due to acquisitions but they are also trying to give everyone a broad range of tools for a connected work place. It down to you to decide what best fits your organizational needs.

Edited July 23, 2019 by HPlum78

[mavhc]

If you're putting information on the internet, make it html. If you have a word file as online documentation you've already failed. If you have to download it to read it it's broken

 

Notices - blog posts

Policies - website

handbooks - websites

Briefings - blog posts

Calendars - calendars

Alerts - email/push notification

Documents - websites

 

Doesn't Microsoft make all Office files view and editable online yet?