During the pandemic, the use of Microsoft Teams exploded. Now organizations struggle to manage documents in a consistent way.
This article highlights some common document management challenges that organizations face when implementing Microsoft Teams and how they can be avoided.
Two rookie mistakes with Microsoft Teams
- Everyone has permission to create teams and channels – When implementing Microsoft Teams, it is common for everyone to have permission to create new teams and channels. This risks creating too many spaces that sometimes serve almost the same purpose.
- Documents are saved in multiple locations – Users are starting to upload and save documents to different channels’ file tabs, while perhaps still saving and managing the organization’s documents on a file server.
Other emerging challenges
- If a team is deleted, all documents stored in the team are also deleted.
- Teams is permission controlled to groups or people. Sometimes it is completely correct, but in many cases documents must be accessible to everyone in an organization and not restricted by permissions.
- Documents are stored in folders under channels.
- Duplicate documents appear in different folders.
- It also becomes difficult to find and search for documents.
- Should you save in Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, the file server or somewhere else?
Teams or SharePoint?
The answer is that if the documents are relevant to others outside the team or if the documents have a longer lifespan, you should create a separate SharePoint site.
- Create a separate SharePoint site
- Applying document management settings and metadata
- Invite the team and other groups that will have access to the site’s members or visitors.
- Create a new tab in the team where you link to this SharePoint site.
- Team members work in a more structured way in the SharePoint tab in Teams and others can access the documents via SharePoint.
Some things are always automatically saved in the file tab in Teams:
- Attachments from conversations
- Recorded meetings
- Notebooks (OneNote)
Because documents have metadata, you can also configure filters in Microsoft Search to make documents easier to find from anywhere in Microsoft 365.
Discover MetaShare – pioneering document management in Microsoft 365
Our MetaShare solution is installed on top of SharePoint and allows you to manage documents in a completely new way in Microsoft 365. MetaShare does not replace SharePoint. MetaShare uses SharePoint’s powerful engine and adds features that improve and simplify SharePoint’s interface.
Some advantages of MetaShare:
- Forcing users to set mandatory tags.
- Automatic tagging of documents based on selected filters.
- Easier filtering and navigation.
- Creates unified collaboration spaces, SharePoint sites and Teams.
- Update settings in one place – changes to metadata, views and other settings are applied to all collaborative spaces and documents.
- No development costs involved.