Teams Sites or Just SharePoint for Staff Departmentals areas

[mdrabble]

I have asked a similar question before but that was purely a sharepoint question.

 

Backgroud info: We have a staff network share with NTFS permissions locking down folders so that only members of a relevant department can write to relevant departmental folders and currently all staff can view all folders.

 

We have already moved the Student Resources to SharePoint and now I am looking to move the departmental areas off prem into the cloud.

 

I am going for a seperate team/sharepoint site per department with AD/Azure Group permission for setting who has access - so anyone in the Local AD group for a certain dept, can then access/save to the relevant Site.

 

I will also have a Central "All Staff" Teams/SharePoint Site for documents/information that relates to all staff.

 

Now...this is where I am in two minds.......

 

Do I create a Team per department, so staff can take advantage of Teams feature (it is up to thm if they use them or not) but will give them access to a SharePoint Site as well

 

or

 

Do I create a simple SharePoint Site for them to access and save documents and no other features?

 

For those who have migrated to the cloud - how have you done it?

 

Cheers

[FN-GM]

I don’t work in education but we did the team site route. Works really well for us! Especially as a new starter my resources are in one place and they can be easily accessed on a tablet / phone.

[tmoon-mint]

Second that I went down the teams route too. Much more user friendly for novices in my opinion.

[Roberto]

I have asked a similar question before but that was purely a sharepoint question.

 

Backgroud info: We have a staff network share with NTFS permissions locking down folders so that only members of a relevant department can write to relevant departmental folders and currently all staff can view all folders.

 

We have already moved the Student Resources to SharePoint and now I am looking to move the departmental areas off prem into the cloud.

 

I am going for a seperate team/sharepoint site per department with AD/Azure Group permission for setting who has access - so anyone in the Local AD group for a certain dept, can then access/save to the relevant Site.

 

I will also have a Central "All Staff" Teams/SharePoint Site for documents/information that relates to all staff.

 

Now...this is where I am in two minds.......

 

Do I create a Team per department, so staff can take advantage of Teams feature (it is up to thm if they use them or not) but will give them access to a SharePoint Site as well

 

or

 

Do I create a simple SharePoint Site for them to access and save documents and no other features?

 

For those who have migrated to the cloud - how have you done it?

 

Cheers

 

Teams site. It's like a SharePoint site for those people who can't handle that new-fangled Teams stuff, but also works with Teams for those that can handle it.

[mdrabble]

Cheers Guys - Teams it will be

[noelmm]

We used SharePoint sites, one per department. This gave us the option of having each department have a slightly custom version with relevant links etc on the site homepage so students and staff could access resources or see a public facing department calendar with trips etc. Each site has 2 document libraries, one for staff and one for students, both with restricted access. While it took a while to setup it seems to work well for our needs, we still have a teams channel per subject as well so our departments can have meetings etc but this is more of a throwback to lockdown.

[E_G_R2]

Firstly whatever works!

 

At my last place we used a Hub site so that we could have across the board navigation via the top menu's and branding. Its kind of Microsoft's recommended method. We did this pre COVID so before Teams became embedded in schools. I believe you can still have a central Hub Site and migrate the Teams to be a part of it. Of course you can have just Sharepoint sites hanging off the Hub Site, depends if you want them to use the Teams features or not.

[mdrabble]

Will I had made my mind up to use a Team per Dept but then I realised on SharePoint, you can have Different Document Libraries - and with permissions set, anyone selected AD/Azure Group cannot see them.

 

So now thing, so I keep the Single Staff SharePoint, and have different Document Libraries for each Department with AD/Azure Group Permissions set on each Library......

 

I set out emails to staff asking which they would prefer, and responses were somewhat lacking and even then, they haven't a clue!

 

What are peoples thoughts about document libraries?

 

Cheers

[Boredguy]

Hadn't thought about going down the different document libraries route, might look into that for the tenancy move for the summer since we have multiple schools to merge resources from local storage.

 

I went down the Teams route for Departments since some already had a departmental distribution list, which was easy to upgrade to Teams back before COVID was a thing, and was the logical step for documents since they had been using Teams for meeting and teaching classes during the Pandemic and they needed to use it regularly as it's now our phone system as well.

 

That said, our "Intranet" for staff is now a SharePoint site, and for ease of staff finding content I've gone to each of the Teams SharePoint page (since that's all Teams filestore is) and put the URL to the channel with the document library into a User Targeted Menu.

This means I can point staff to the common "Documents" link, but they only see the Links to Teams they are in, so while everyone gets a "General Resources" link from that SharePoint site, those doing multiple subjects see them as well and it takes them directly to that document library.

This also allowed departments to have their own team SharePoint page and can post news, which in turn I can pick up on the main page based on what they have access to.

 

However the reason for doing it this way that actually came to light quickly since September.... the ever helpful "shortcut to OneDrive" option. Having all 2Tb of departmental areas within a single SharePoint site and having a teacher click that link meant the OneDrive client would try and index the entire SharePoint site and download it to the workstation. Fine if your only on 1 device like a laptop.. but as our staff move workstations the delay in resources appearing for a single Team shortcut was bad enough for 2 teachers, never mind several accidently doing it for the whole Staff resources.

Not saying it's a bad thing, but it certainly got a few confused staff for a day or two.

 

There is no right or wrong route to go down for the file storage, it just depends how you want to manage it, as at the end of the day both Teams and SharePoint are exactly the same.. just 1 is better suited for mass use and one is meant to be for smaller groups.

[E_G_R2]

As per my post 22nd September, our hub site had associated sites linked via the hub menu. Each sub site was a communication site with web links, diaries and document libraries secured with O365 group permissions.

 

I've had the problem with the OneDrive client, i suppose one way around it would be to link Sharepoint via File Explorer in the traditional File share way so that they can use the 'T' drive to navigate to the teachers document library.

 

This link explains the different options and why - https://sharepointmaven.com/4-types-of-sites-in-sharepoint-online/

Edited November 24, 2022 by E_G_R2

[Boredguy]

I'm only trusting the OneDrive client purely for the users own documents, everything else we're pointing them to either the Web interface, or use the "Sites" button when in the Office applications instead of the old File Explorer

[mdrabble]

As per my post 22nd September, our hub site had associated sites linked via the hub menu. Each sub site was a communication site with web links, diaries and document libraries secured with O365 group permissions.

 

I've had the problem with the OneDrive client, i suppose one way around it would be to link Sharepoint via File Explorer in the traditional File share way so that they can use the 'T' drive to navigate to the teachers document library.

 

This link explains the different options and why - https://sharepointmaven.com/4-types-of-sites-in-sharepoint-online/

 

This is the way I just insisted we go after a meeting I;ve just been to and was the way I was planning to move towards, but after some staff offered suggestions, I thought it only fair to hear them out and look at their suggestions.

[mdrabble]

This may sound like a stupid question - but what naming convention do people use for their sites?

[Boredguy]

For the staff areas, it's along the lines of "EnglishDept", "ScienceDept", however I will be updating them to have our school site code in front once we move tenancies since we will have 5 school "English Departments" if we don't have them all under the single "Trust" one