Sanity check - network folders to Sharepoint Online

[BJG]

The current network has been a bit of a baptism of fire with regards to Sharepoint; some members of the IT Dept are very keen and have been using it as the basis of various types of document storage and associated workflows for years. I'm still trying to get my head around it.

 

One of the current projects is moving stuff to the cloud. Personal network folders are going to OneDrive, and shared departmental folders are going to Sharepoint Online. There's discussion of Microsoft concepts such as "The world is flat"...traditional hierarchical folder structures are out, and everything gets moved to a single space, tagged with metadata in order to be able to create customisable views. This is all tied up with Teams, the move to agile working, etc.

 

I get the theory, but it's hard work. Has anyone gone down this route? I'd be interested in any general thoughts.

Edited July 26, 2023 by BJG

[E_G_R2]

Hi,

 

I've created a Intra/Extranet using SharePoint, Hub Site for navigation. Each faculty has its own area. I've then let them put the data where they want based on how they want their sites to look. We tried having it all in one Document Library but it didn't work well with some of the web parts that they wanted to use as it was a bit fiddly for them. Letting each faculty choose where they store the data has worked so much better. Essentially I'm giving them ownership of their teaching data rather than IT dictating where it is located.

[psydii]

Each Department / functional team/ area of operations gets their own Team. This gives them a 'distribution group' a shared Document Library (in a SharePoint Team site), and a chat/collaboration space.

 

It is a flat structure, no subsites and nothing too clever going on with metadata or any of the fancy things you could do with Sharepoint back from 2000-2013. Keep it simple.

 

For the departments/functional teams/areas of operations that regularly published information to the whole school or a significant subset of the whole school, we have a parallel set of "Communication" sites, each functional area that need one gets a communication site that the manage more as a webpage than a document library. All staff have View permissions to these communication sites. The relevant functional area are set as owners of these sites. Depending on how they want to operate (presenting live data vs snapshot) they either copy documents to these comms sites and make a pretty webpage, or they link directly to the live document in their Team Site (with appropriate sharing permissions set on the specific file/folder). We use the Hub site functionality to provide a pseudo-hierarchic structure to assist people in navigating these comms sites.

[mdrabble]

I’ve just done the very same thing this month (SharePoint only for now)

 

Gave them plenty of notice (6 months) to get their heads around the move and to come for training if required.

 

I created their own teams sites with Hub etc then told staff they are responsible for moving their own data, and to only move current and relevant data only! They do not need to move data from the year 2000.

 

Set permissions with mailed enabled security groups we already had in place which are used for dept distribution emails, paper cut and now SharePoint - so all we need to do is add staff to relevant groups and they have access.

 

They were told, come August the staff shared areas were going, so anything not moved is there loss to give them a sense of urgency (I’m just removing the drive mapping) and will keep it archived for 12 months before removing the data from the server.

 

They have been told we will be moving home drive to one drive during next year to give them time to think ahead and to see if anyone wants to be an early adopter to make sure all works as intended.

Edited July 26, 2023 by mdrabble