Managing Shared Areas

[APMerry]

Hi,

 

Does anyone have any strategies they've used to try and control how data is saved on shared locations. We have a Sharepoint site for teaching staff data and people duplicate so much data because it's all sorted into subjects, year groups, academic years and buried inside folders inside folders.

 

I don't really know where to start with reorganising it and making it less chaotic.

[Michael]

As the Network Admin you can't really. You can provide guidance/recommendations (as I do), but unfortunately you just have to leave them to it.

[jthompson]

We give staff the ability to create shared drives on Google and essentially leave them to it. Works well, tbh. A bit messy to begin with whilst people figured it out (when to create a shared drive vs just sharing a particular doc normally, etc.), but after a year or two it's matured and stabilised to the point where we're not seeing many new drives being created now.

[mavhc]

Step 0: Only I can create new root folders.

Step 1: Assign an owner to every folder.

Step 2: Blame the owner

 

Amusing side effect: People can create folders in Explorer in the root, but they don't sync. They then email everyone saying they're in the root folder

[River]

We have SharePoint sites for each subject and then just let the department heads deal with that. Staff are getting better at sharing links and not emailing files all over the place and creating multiple copies.

[kevin_lane]

yea this is something i think is in all school staff just love to dump and duplicate, and i now i am at the point of refusing to increase the capacity, because they cant be bothered to go through the rubbish and remove the stuff they don't need, well i don't want my backups taking over 10 hours lol

 

SharePoint is something I'm looking at now, I'm testing it with our Music Department and seeing how they get on, not heard anything bad just yet so will see, any other tips that people have i would be grateful to hear about

[djm968]

SharePoint is something I'm looking at now

Sharepoint just moves the same problem to the cloud, except it's now a DfE Digital Standards Compliant mess!

[kennysarmy]

We have SharePoint sites for each subject and then just let the department heads deal with that. Staff are getting better at sharing links and not emailing files all over the place and creating multiple copies.

 

Hi,

 

Why did you go for separate sites rather than document libraries?

 

How do you handle staff who work across different departments when you sync the data?

[River]

Hi,

 

Why did you go for separate sites rather than document libraries?

 

How do you handle staff who work across different departments when you sync the data?

 

Separate sites as the Head of Department can own and manage. Also, they are using the Teams element so can have internal chat/meetings which was handy during lockdown.

Data for all staff is in an all staff SharePoint site, with only some staff able to edit this so it hasn't become a place for all files. So far seems to work fine.

[kennysarmy]

Separate sites as the Head of Department can own and manage. Also, they are using the Teams element so can have internal chat/meetings which was handy during lockdown.

Data for all staff is in an all staff SharePoint site, with only some staff able to edit this so it hasn't become a place for all files. So far seems to work fine.

 

Thanks for your reply, but if you have a cover teacher who might need access to multiple sties, I'm guessing they just use the web versions rather than the files be synced using the client?

[River]

Thanks for your reply, but if you have a cover teacher who might need access to multiple sties, I'm guessing they just use the web versions rather than the files be synced using the client?

 

We very rarely have an external cover teacher. Any internal cover usually involves work being set and another teacher making sure the class do it