We've just 'upgraded' at work, some serious teething issues still being worked through, but at least I could answer emails today.
Tell me:
Top tips to get the best from this.
What crap can I ignore? There seems to be multiple ways of 'chatting' to various teams and stuff...
What might be causing really slow running of this - phone on WiFi works nippily, but browser based access is best described as near glacial...?
I feeel your pain.
top tip avoid asking SFRS award wining ICT dept for help.😐
We've an 'award winning' IT company doing the [s]cocked up excuse for an installation with no training or adequate consulting up front [/s] install.
cocked up excuse for an installation with no training or adequate consulting up front
Sounds like you got the SFRS team to do the install
One drive is good get it set up as a "drive".
Teams seems pretty good too.
Sharepoint us shite though just email it.
Our chairman said we were moving to sharepoint a few weeks ago, replacing a perfectly good document control system. Is sharepoint really as bad as a quick google suggests?
We had the OneDrive syncs turned off as it was killing our network.
Watch our for sharing OneDrive files that are sensitive as unless the right config the recipients can forward the content too (e.g give access to your OneDrive too without your approval).
SharePoint is ok.
Teams can be useful for project work (install the desktop app).
We had the OneDrive syncs turned off as it was killing our network
We don't intend to use onedrive.
We have a shared drive on SharePoint, that is to be used for everything. Only exception is things needed for running training or similar off-site.
Could it be that some colleagues have saved huge amount into OneDrive already and also killing our network?
OneDrive will muller the network if you've got the entire company all doing an initial sync at once. Once completed the delta should be relatively small.
Would leaving all the computers on overnight allow for the initial data dump to get done?
As with all things MS, SharePoint is a massive tool that integrates with the rest of the 365 infrastructure in sometimes odd and confusing ways.
How good or bad it is really depends on what you use it for. Loads of smaller business are using is simply as a replacement for a file server, it’s easy to do, throw your data on MS servers for not much money, organise them in sites if you want, but one site for the whole (small) company is fine, assign access roles based on needs etc and away you go.
To really use it as it was intended as collaborative tool you need everyone onboard and a decent investment of time for training and the use of other elements of 365 like teams.
Personally, I’d use SharePoint for data store, SkypeFB for IM and good old outlook for Email and diaries etc.
Personally, I’d use SharePoint for data store, SkypeFB for IM and good old outlook for Email and diaries etc
That is the plan.
The client at my current gig is rolling out sharepoint. It has huge potential beyond being a file server, but there is little appetite to ring the value out of it. I'm keen to adopt the wiki functionality as an alternative to Confluence to reduce the need for office 365 docs. Time will tell how it works out.
If you do not already use Skype for biz you should skip it and go straight to Teams. It is combination of Skype and Slack (without most fun parts).
Teams uses SharePoint libraries for files but it seems that help manager find it easier to share via Teams.
Teams client on phones is pretty good but the desktop version is memory hog, other important things to do are to set the notification settings properly (remove most of them), set one company wide team with sensible channels and think before you start wildly creating too specific teams.
Teams seems pretty good too.
Teams is ******* awful. Massive resource hog and a terrible interface.
...award wining ICT dept...
surely that is a typo:
whining ICT dept
is more likely!
Ask your award-winning ICT company why they didn't configure OneDrive in 'Files on Demand Mode' from the off, assuming they didn't the syncs could be killing the network. In O365 technically onedrive and SharePoint are the same storage with different interfaces. The interface to SharePoint is beyond dreadful unless you get a competent Sharepoint Dev consultancy to customise it. Simply Put use Teams and One Drive to do everything and the pain will be less, I never get SharePoint files from Sharepoint directly it's always from the relevant files tab in a Teams channel.
Yes, the Teams client is a resource hog but bear with it, in our monthly round up call with MS yesterday they told us they're addressing that as a priority so it will get better soon.
We’ve an ‘award winning’ IT company doing
the cocked up excuse for an installation with no training or adequate consulting up frontinstall.
Sounds pretty standard. I fell into SharePoint administration a few years back after our company migrated from Lotus Notes to the "Microsoft stack". It was installed under a project by a consultancy and both swiftly disappeared leaving it to sprawl throughout the company without proper governance, training or guidelines. I was glad to leave it all behind.
As an old school Lotus Notes / email administrator, I was keen to see it used for document sharing to save storage space. It always seems to do 90% of what you want and then fall down at the REALLY useful bit, or become unusably complicated to get that 10%. And now saving space is most irrelevant so I gave up caring.
Top tips? Sign up to SharePoint Maven for monthly emails. They're quite useful for an interested user bordering on administration.
Turn off auto save in office documents when saving to sharepoint.
It may keep things up to date, also means that the document automatically saves any change as you go through, even if unintended.
Yes, you can go and sort through version histories etc. but it is still a stupid idea.
We use Sharepoint instead of a file server and it works for our needs. We have a largely mobile workforce so they use their phones or logon to a PC to connect. Also use Bookings, OneNote, Email, Calendar and all the office apps.
Really wanting MS to integrate everything properly, as it is still too disjointed. Teams is a good idea (it's a front end for various part of O365), and you can add services too it, but you still can't search properly. For example, we'd like to use Planner instead of Trello, but the search facility is terrible even within the app, let alone from Delve. It's getting there, but it feel s like the end of the rainbow.
Gsuite is of course the Google alternative, but that is not without its vices.
If you want to access your SharePoint folders just like you did though Windows Explorer, log into SharePoint online using IE, find your folder and click the "all documents" button at the side and select view in explorer. Once explorer opens, pin the link to your Quick Access bar. Not found a way to automate this unfortunately so it's a manual process to add it.
Really don't like teams but i'm sure it'll grow on me as it gets updated.
I've been disappointed in the administrative side of 365. very easy to have security weaknesses by default and requires a lot of knowledge to set it up in a secure way. Microsoft want 365 to be easily accessible by anyone in the world anytime and make it easy to share files with outside parties. If not setup or used right, it's a data breach waiting to happen. We found a way to get global admin access rights quite easily last week! Only a matter of time before attackers leverage it to get at your data.
Get Multi Factor Authentication setup. without it, your organisation is very likely to have a security breach due to Phishing.
give me a file server and VPN/RDS any day of the week! I'm old school though...in my 30s
give me a file server and VPN/RDS any day of the week! I’m old school though…in my 30s
We'd agree, sadly SharePoint is pretty much free once you've paid for 365 E1 / Business Essentials which most businesses have since the demise of SBS. It's hard to convince paymasters to pay thousands for a physical server or hundreds a month for a Azure / AWS version instead. Geo-redundancy, 30 day retention with versioning, it's a compelling offer.
We're still stuttering along. And I'm easy past my level of understanding.
Transpires that:
I (and some colleagues) are struggling to easily access documents in SharePoint as we are lacking the shortcuts in file explorer, this also means that to insert images from SharePoint I have to download them, then insert from my machine.
The colleagues that do have the shortcuts in file explorer are effectively syncing a terrabyte of all the shared files on SharePoint, eating bandwidth, processing power and battery... Because of this, we're being asked to reduce our company files down (ie delete data) and we are to be limited in what files we can access. This seems odd...
I'm with joshvegas on this one, Teams and OneDrive work great. But one of the best free apps on my phone is Office Lens for capturing Whiteboard and flipchart drawings and sending them directly to Teams, although you can save to pdf or share to pretty much any other app.
1. What an earlier post said, save/bookmark frequently used folder page(s).
2. 'Pin' frequently used files within folders so you can quickly access them.
3. Task view (I think its called) might be useful. It's a feature where you can have PPM features such as Gantt charts.
4. Sharepoint classic view. Should be an option at far bottom left of screen so you can adjust set up if required.
5. 'Alert Me' is useful if you want to keep track of whenever someone edits a particular file.
6. Be prepared for, if you have them, your SharePoint administrators to not know the answers or take ages as they Google the answers.
SkypeFB for IM
Isn't SkypeFB being deprecated in favour of teams.
SfB (cloud version) isn't being developed any more, but there's no announced plans around turning it off. Teams is recommended for new deployments, and a lot of customers are migrating/have migrated to Teams from SfB.
SfB will continue for on-premise, i.e. you run your own SfB server.
Teams is becoming the main comms/collaboration/files tool within Microsoft. I spend more time in Teams than I do in Outlook, and very rarely access Sharepoint directly (but use it all the time indirectly through Teams, OneDrive, intranet).
It's pretty well known the client is fairly chunky at the moment, which may be an issue for older PCs. I use a 3 year old Surface Pro 4 which is fine with it though.
Office Lens is indeed brilliant for photographing whiteboards, business card etc.
Matt, if your still looking for help, there is a guy called Andy Hodges who is a SharePoint consultant recently moved into Codebase Stirling. His website is: http://www.thinkshare.uk/
Might be worth a chat as he's so local.