Collaborating with SharePoint Online and Teams
Did you know that you can integrate and work on content from your SharePoint Online site in Teams? This makes collaborating easier and managing permissions much simpler
Once you have set up your SharePoint Online site, you can add elements from the site into Teams channels:
Working on documents together
If you want to work on documents with colleagues and then have the final versions published in SharePoint, you can add a SharePoint Online document library to Teams as a ‘tab’ in any channel. This means you can all edit the documents in Teams and when you want a different group of people to view the final documents, you just give them access to the SharePoint Online site to view them.
Managing shared lists of things
If you have a group of people who all need to work on the same set of information, such as a list of people, survey results or equipment inventories, then you can create a list in SharePoint Online and add it as a ‘tab’ in the appropriate channel in Teams.
Sharing information
If you want to share fixed information, such as guidance or policies, you can create a page in SharePoint Online and add that as a ‘tab’ in a channel in Teams. You can then edit it from Teams, if needed, but keep the page 'read only' in SharePoint Online. You can also do this with news from SharePoint Online, which will be updated when new articles are published.
Pick and mix tools for effective project management
There are quite a lot of useful tools spread across the various Nexus365 services, such as Tasks and Planner, SharePoint newsfeeds and Data display web parts in SharePoint Online. If you want to use these tools in Teams, you can add them as additional ‘tabs’ to the appropriate channel. You can also add an entire SharePoint Online site if that’s a more convenient way for people in Teams to access the material they need to see. It’s worth having a look at what’s available and trying out different combinations.
Top tips, dos and don’ts
This article is about separate SharePoint Online sites, not the SharePoint Online site that ‘lives’ behind Teams, which shouldn’t be considered as a SharePoint Online site in the normal way. You should treat the site behind Teams only as a storage place for Teams and you should only interact with it via Teams. Do not try and customise or change it, particularly changing the permissions, as this will have a negative effect on how Teams works for you.
Another thing to remember is that Libraries and Lists will honour the access controls and permissions you set in the original SharePoint Online site, so if users in your Team do not have access to that list in SharePoint Online, they won’t have access to it in Teams either.
