Collaborating with SharePoint Online (SPO) and Teams

SharePoint Online (SPO) is more than just a convenient place to store files, it’s a fully-fledged collaboration system that can streamline the way you work, helping you to collaborate more effectively with colleagues in your own unit, or right across the University.  Using Microsoft’s 'modern experience', SharePoint Online is easy to use and has lots of features to help us all work better.  

In this article, we provide some reminders about how you can collaborate using Teams and SPO, as well as a few new (or coming soon) features that might help you. 

Collaborating with SPO using Teams 

Did you know that you can integrate and work on content from your SharePoint Online site using Teams?  This makes collaborating easier and managing permissions much simpler. You can: 

• Surface SharePoint documents, pages and lists using tabs in Microsoft Teams making it quicker to access commonly used items. 
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  Collaborate with colleagues outside the University to work on publications using a safe, common platform. 

• Show Stream (on SharePoint) videos in your Teams chats and channels. 
• Control membership and permissions using Microsoft Teams groups and unit-level groups in your SharePoint sites    

Find out more about how to safely collaborate using SPO and Teams with this ‘tech talk’ recording which explains what you can do, as well as a few things not to do.   

Features available now or coming soon 

As with all their products, Microsoft continues innovating and developing SharePoint Online. Here are a few SharePoint Online features we think could be useful – look out for these over the coming months: 

Available now 

• Create SharePoint lists from .CSV files - You can now import from a CSV file to create a list with it. When you do this, your source and destination lists will look identical, down to all the custom formatting, choice buttons, rich text editing etc. 
• Stream (on SharePoint) dedicated video web part - This new Stream web part supports configuration of single and multiple videos for Stream (on SharePoint) allowing you to bring rich video content to modern page layouts with lots of display and customisation options.  
• SharePoint Pages and News – new content pane helping you to quickly browse and add content to SharePoint pages. With this new feature, authors can easily drag and drop web parts, media, and section templates for creating rich and engaging pages. 

Coming soon 

• New Document Library templates - allowing you to select from pre-built Document Library setups for specific purposes such as document authoring and approval, asset tracking and personnel-related templates. 
• SharePoint design ideas and suggestions – helping to improve the look and feel of your SharePoint pages 
• New forms experience for Microsoft Lists - making it easier to collect information with an updated forms experience for Microsoft Lists  
• SharePoint video pages – templates will be available in both SharePoint and Stream, making it easy to showcase video with a customised and branded pages experience from either application. 
• SharePoint video – Inline playback in highlighted content web parts allowing you to watch a video without being taken off the SharePoint Page and keeps the video playing while you browse/scroll through other contents on the Page. 

You can keep up to date with developments and new features on the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

SPO training, help and advice  

The best way to find out what’s going on in SharePoint Online is to join the Nexus365 User Group (NUG) on Teams, the code is LNJVOFR. Through the SharePoint Online User Group channel, you can share your experiences or tips for using SharePoint Online with others across the University and find informal support.  

Our SPO guidance is a great starting point for information about how to use this versatile software. You will also find a wealth of information and guidance on the University’s SharePoint Service Home site including an extensive help and support section.   

Even more information about how to get SPO help, advice and training is also available on our IT Help website.   

Did you know? 

You can make your site more engaging by using the 'Image gallery' web part to share collections of pictures on a page.