We are starting to use Office 365 more and more in our company and I thought I would share some of our learnings. It isn’t always obvious what extra Office 365 can do for you (aside from being a way to rent Office instead of being able to buy it).
Once of the things that was a bit confusing was WHERE in Office 365 should we be filing documents (Word, Excel, PDFs etc). We want to stop using shared drives on our own network and move these files to the Office 365 cloud.
There appears to be two main options: OneDrive for Business and Sharepoint Team sites. In this post, we look at when to use what.
When should you use OneDrive for Business?
OneDrive for Business is meant to be a place where you file your own documents. These are generally documents that you do not want to share with others.
Think of it as your new “My Documents” folder.
The advantage of having your files in OneDrive instead of My Documents are that they are now “in the cloud. This means that you can access your file from any device that you are working on (your computer, your smart phone, tablet etc).
OneDrive for Business also has a handy desktop application that automatically copies any files you create and save (into specific folders on your computer) up into the cloud which makes it a very useful automatic backup tool for your computer.
When should you use a Sharepoint Team Site?
Save documents to Sharepoint Team Sites when you need to file documents into a shared place where other members of your team can access them. Sharepoint has some additional features for setting security and version control on those files but in its most basic form…
Think of Team Sites as the new shared folders (that you used to have on the network… where multiple users can file documents for collaboration and archiving).
Instead of filing documents to shared folders on your network, you should now file them to Team Site folders.
Getting Started
I hope that this brief post helps you understand what should be filed where. Now here are links to two useful posts to help create and setup the appropriate OneDrive and Team Site folders in Office 365.
The first link below gives a more detailed explanation of what I summarised above.
(Microsoft) Should I save my documents to OneDrive for Business or a team site?
The second link has extremely useful tutorials that you can use to setup Office 365, Sharepoint and OneDrive to work in your business.
(Microsoft) Customize your Office 365 team site for file storage and sharing
NOTE: Office 365 has changed a little from the explanations in the link above. Where the instructions say click on Sites on the Office 365Home page, you will need to click on Sharepoint instead as shown in the following image.
COMMENTS PLEASE: Please share your own favourite tricks for saving files in Office 365 by leaving a comment below.
