Leveraging SharePoint with Office 365

Some people think that with all these new tools from Office 365, and with the explosion of Teams, a lot of times they ask what's up with SharePoint? Where does SharePoint fit in the mix? And SharePoint-- it's there stronger than ever, I would say, in a lot of ways. It's the glue behind a lot of the things that are going on with Teams. When you create a Team, it creates a SharePoint site. So SharePoint-- it's awesome. And also new coming out from SharePoint's are the home sites. So if people aren't familiar with those, Microsoft is giving us a way to create a new home site in our SharePoint environment that is tailored news. But also personalization is starting to bring in other content. SharePoint is just becoming the thing that's just always there. And it's always useful. And it's always showing up in different ways. And then on top of that, you add in things like bots, where you can now take your user's experience to be conversational with a bot. And they no longer have to say, oh where did I store that file, or how do I submit a vacation request, when they can just interact with a bot and say I want to submit a vacation request. And the bot responds with well hey, tell me about your vacation request. And I'll let your manager know. And so it turns the whole experience into much more conversational, much more real world language. So you're not hunting for specific keywords. You're not forgetting what you named it. It's just all very natural language. So it's definitely where things are going. So a lot of the adoption issues we see with SharePoint Online is people just trying to wrap their head around all the stuff. Because when they get into Office 365, it's not just SharePoint. It's all these apps out there. It's all these things that just light up automatically. There's things like Teams. And people start to freak out when they see people creating Teams all over the place. Because Teams create these SharePoint sites. They create all these other artifacts. So basically, it's just it's a big freak out of help me understand what's going on. What's up with this chaos? Is there something you can do? So when you go to SharePoint Online and you go to Office 365, you do have to put a lot more thought into planning and understanding what's there. So once people kind of get educated and they learn to put some real governance in place-- I mean, they've been talking about governance in SharePoint since forever. But how many organizations actually implement governance, right? They've got a plan that's gathering dust. And they don't do anything about it. But unfortunately, governance is becoming a real thing that you can no longer just say, yeah we have a plan, and ignore it. You've got actually put some thought into it and implement it. So the big risks for not having the governance plan in place is that you are going to get sprawl. You're going to have people creating a Team when another Team already existed. And you're just going to have an architectural mess. You're not going to have any visibility into what's going on. People are going to be creating Teams that are going to squat on URLs that you can no longer use in SharePoint. Because they created a team called HR. And well, now you can't go and create your internet site collection of HR. Because that URL has now being taken by someone who created the team. There's groups that get created, the emails that get created. It's a nightmare. And people freak out. So if you're going to SharePoint Online, the first thing you need to do is take into account the new best practices for your site architecture. The new best practices are a flat world. So stop thinking of sub sites. Start thinking of everything as a site collection. Look at what you have today if you're migrating something online. And see what you can potentially turn into a Team. like that internal HR department site you have-- maybe you need to promote that up to a site collection in SharePoint Online, attach a team to it, and now your internal HR department is working together in Teams. So also, there are some power shell scripts in place you can use so that when people provision new Teams, it can do things like prepend some text to the front of the name so that all of your teams have some identifying way of knowing that this site is for a Team. But there's a lot of scripts out there. You can help with that type of governance as well.