Everything You Need To Know About Teams and SharePoint Features

Craig Yellick, VP Business Solutions

Blue Net, located in Eagan, does SharePoint development focusing on clients in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul metropolitan area and greater Minnesota. Though in no way limited geographically, we’ve built Office 365 solutions for organizations all over the USA and even internationally.

While SharePoint is often a key element in Office 365 business solutions, Blue Net embraces the entire Office 365 family of products and services including Teams and the Power Platform.

Things To Know About SharePoint Features

• Are you using Excel spreadsheets for process tracking? You can do better! Anything you’re doing in Excel can also be accomplished in a SharePoint list, then taken to the next level using alerts, workflow automations and more. Spreadsheets are passive, SharePoint and Teams-based solutions are active participants in the process.
• SharePoint permissions management extends outside of document libraries. All lists of any kind have the same security and permissions features. Avoid assigning permissions to individual files or list items, as this gets to be a real nightmare to manage. Instead, leverage SharePoint’s hierarchy where document libraries and lists live within sites and subsites. Permissions granted or removed at one level extend to all items below. Careful attention to this structure will make permissions management much easier.
• SharePoint content management takes many forms. How you structure sites, sub-sites, libraries and lists behind the scenes does not necessarily mean your users will see this structure. SharePoint has extensive customization abilities so the structure can be used to manage security and permissions most effectively (see above) while the content is arranged optimally for the user’s experience. And content located in SharePoint can be surfaced anywhere in Teams.
• SharePoint has numerous social features and ties into the presence awareness features in Teams. For example, while looking at content in SharePoint you can see at a glance if the author is available for a quick chat or a call. This extends all the way into the document itself, multiple people can be editing or reviewing at the same time and be able to chat in real-time.

What You Should Know About Teams

Teams is built on top of a specialized SharePoint site, so it’s fair to say that when you’re using Teams, you’re using SharePoint. For example, anything you can do in a SharePoint document library can also be done in the Files tab of a team channel. Additionally, any content in SharePoint can be added as a tab in a team channel. For example, a calendar that is used by multiple departments to coordinate activities is correctly stored in SharePoint but made visible in multiple team channels each with a customized view. Alerts and notifications can be sent to a channel or even an individual user.

Using the Power Platform, both Teams and SharePoint can host Power Automate workflow automations and Power Apps-based data collection forms. Or a Power App can live entirely outside of SharePoint/Teams yet still integrate with them to form hybrid solutions.

How SharePoint Works With Teams

As such we’re frequently asked about whether a proposed solution should be developed in SharePoint or Teams or some other Office product. We always say: embrace the power of AND. There is no reason to think in terms of a single product. Office 365 is designed to form integrated solutions. Our Office 365 developers are experts at combining the right combination of features and functionality to form solutions that are efficient and cost-effective and run your business better.

Even when the bulk of a solution ends up in SharePoint, integration features make it possible that users of the solution aren’t aware of this.

Start Using SharePoint Today

Contact Blue Net today, we’re happy to help you get more value out of your investment in the full set of products and features you’re paying for but not using.