 Bethany says with a significant portion of our workforce operating remotely I'm exploring how SharePoint can facilitate better collaboration and communication. That sounds like a postcard. I'm interested in best practices for setting up SharePoint to support remote teams effectively, especially in terms of document sharing, communication channels, and project collaborations. Well that's just a small question isn't it Bethany? It's really small. I had just recently a project I was working on that was still living in file share with VPN in an email and I've never seen such a siloed going right the way back. They were right, still they had all older SharePoints that were 2009, 12, like going all the way back right through to 19, but they were still all on-premise and they were going to the cloud and watching these people work was so stilted and so siloed and information was lost and the teams weren't actually collaborating or communicating at all unless they were in depth by meeting and they then couldn't get their work done to then have it and shift to the other side. Now when you look at that you kind of think oh that's the norm but once you've lived in the new world it makes such a massive difference in terms of having that you know the SharePoint piece where they could just get their information from any device that alone and having SharePoint for them to be able to collaborate and just send a link instead of attachments and losing files and not knowing which version it was and then just that alone we saw such an increase in the way that they were collaborating especially with remotely with information feeling lost and living in meetings so they started to work a bit more asynchronously instead of synchronously like in the death by meeting that alone I think was just good to see. Best practices this is the starting point right everybody got shoved into the cloud because of the pandemic and right now we're retroactively having to go back and fix things you know like you get a team and you get a team there's like 50,000 teams or 10 people because every time they created a meeting so planning that architecture and starting with who needs to work together you know I always my formula is like who needs to work together what are they working on how are they going to get that work done and that's how I structure my teams but you don't have to have teams for SharePoint sites either so you know you can have SharePoint sites for the communication piece and who needs to know what when and set up your communication size but always start with the who you can shove technology out the door but people aren't going to use it unless it's usable and we do that by talking to them and asking them what what do you need to get done and who do you need to work with to get that done. But I look at this too and I think it's like is it just SharePoint are you looking at the entire platform Microsoft 365 because I mean are like where does teams fit is it depending on the size of the organization are you looking at engage you know for that for that aspect of it I mean all these pieces how they work together I mean this is such a again not a small question it is truly and it depends answer by I think those there's no wrong answer for for like what you guys have shared there but I mean my first thought is you're depending on what you want to do is first go in and define what are those the outcomes what are the goals what are you trying to do if this truly is just the SharePoint the intranet component of that it's very different than answering this question about collaboration and communication in general which can be a lot of different pieces together. So Christian I'll kind of add to what everyone has said so far I think there's a lot of things we need to think about here. Sure SharePoint might be the answer for the more formal things as far as documentation for HR or maybe the finance likes to work in SharePoint if they've been doing that for a while but for that collaboration that we're talking about that's essentially what teams was set up for was to be that central hub for your communications for your collaboration. So to what Christy and Sherry were saying it is essential to make sure that you have the right structure for a team. I think a lot of that goes to if it's not working right now get those end users in there with you and do some user acceptance testing find out what's not working so that you can reconfigure those teams if you have too many teams like Sherry was saying if we've got team sprawl happening it could also be there's too many channels right if they're having a hard time and they're overwhelmed at finding where they need to go to have that conversation or to find that information. We've got search but we know that that might not be the end all for finding things quickly that they need. Maybe it's restructuring how many channels there are and how that collaboration needs to happen there to your point Christian. I think it's also making sure that you're bringing in the right apps and services into that team and helping them to know hey you can have a planner tab here. You know you've got this one notebook that comes with it. You can add a list. You can bring in whatever website you need. So if you can design it to where it is that hub that they can get everything done that they need to you're going to foster better adoption and quicker ways for them to know oh I get it now this is the way I can collaborate and then also doing things like hey did you know you can get to one drive from teams you don't have to go out to that separate app. So then we get into the app switching and the glass over the whole of 365 with using teams. Yeah, don't be getting into that. We're not having the context switching and the app to app switching that has to happen. We could do pretty much everything that we need to do right. Be in that deep focused work. Yeah, yeah, I think you know a lot of times when I see it starting it's that creating of that just starting from the I need to create a SharePoint site just will hang on a second are you looking as you say Christian is it you're doing the internet and you need a hub and what does the structure of the organization to look like because I've seen it go really really pear shaped but they didn't want to create it where there was too much going depth. They just wanted to go wide and when they went wide it became a mess because they didn't want to do it by org structure. You couldn't find a thing so there's that internet side of it to the I'm a team and I need to collaborate as a team and you know what does it look like and if you've got a large organization trying to get to org wide after 100 it falls apart and you need to then go into vibrant gauge. So it's like what tech are you trying to you know what is the solution? What are you trying to answer here for the business? Because that is as you said you know best practice it's like well best practice but for what area cause SharePoint is a beast. So I've got questions for the question because you could use it in you could use it in so many ways. Are you trying to set up you know a brand site emergency operations that you're trying to you know there's so many different things that you could do with this technology. So best practice though is still the same you know structure. She says Sharon governance. Who are the people? How are they collaborating? Why are they collaborating or needing to communicate with the hybrid workforce? Is it you just need them to have somewhere to go and get information because you just need to share points aren't so yeah so many facets to this so many facets and one of the things that I would add which is kind of ironic considering a lot of the people on this color trainers is that so much has changed in the last five or six years in terms of SharePoint like all of you guys have mentioned that one of the things that we recommend to all of our clients is you know if we're going to be doing an internet setup or a migration or we're going to implement teams or something like that. We really push hard to have some upfront training to let them know like this is how it works now. It's kind of funny because you know even several years ago I'd walk in and admins would meet with me and be like okay well how do I do this this isn't like let's stop and let me draw on a whiteboard what it looks like now because I don't think you understand how much it's changed so I think there's an education piece from a best practice perspective for if you're especially going to the cloud and doing 365 I don't care if you are on the admin side on the dev side on the user side on the marketing communication side I do think that so much has changed that part of the best practice rollout in my opinion would be to have some element of training as you're doing this because that way people will understand what it is you're trying to accomplish. Not only that but I just did it sorry I just did it with champs and don't have the designer and everything they're not your champs the people that are managing the documentation or working or the migration they are not necessarily champs they can be they can be one and the same but you've got two levels of it because someone that's in the doing doesn't mean that they make a good champ to advocate and train and help the rest of the organization so you know we've got the volunteer and the volunteer so don't confuse the two in terms of best practice have the two groups with that education to drive forward and to do two different components when it comes to SharePoint on top of that Sharon. Don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel either because there's adoption.microsoft.com you're not the first ones and if you want to learn from the mistakes of others or you know those of us you know all of us are sitting here going call me because we can't get one. Step 2 have their white papers and awards and things like that on best practice global best practice around SharePoint don't have a look at some of them and have a look and see what they've done to help this journey they've got some fabulous content. Yeah and to Sherry's point the adoption site has some great scenarios too and they may not be specific to your industry or to the specific departments or roles that you're trying to have that collaboration for but they should be a good place for you to maybe get some ideas of how that correlates to the type of collaboration that you're looking to have and I would say early on you want to get a mix of end users into some kind of a workshop to be able to figure out as you're doing the training like Sharon was saying those are when they have the aha moments of oh yeah this would work really well for this specific need that we've had like these roadblocks with or it's been a very clunky manual process but now I get it on how this can make us more automated or have better communications and collaboration happen with that and then that kind of becomes what you then build from or know that you're going to include to help train in the future like you can use those kinds of great little bits to help you build that out and know that that's going to foster adoption if it's the things that they're excited about and that are going to help them within their department or across those business units or as an entire organization those are the little gems to find and the idea of workshopping it piloting something out trying it with a smaller group the other important aspect of this and it's great you brought up Heather the broader adoption of that too is that the more that you can align it and fit it into the culture of your organization and tweak it to the nuances of what's different about the way that people in your org collaborate you know if you have been you know an older generation of employees there that aren't as you know active on mobile devices for example you might do things differently than with you know a Gen Z and everybody is connected and they get that aspect of it but they're not going to do more of the documentation they want more of the chat in the instant versus the you know the long and you know video and documentation type of collaboration so you know if you have that chance to play around with the culture test it out and then grow it organically it's gonna have a lot better chance of sticking over the long term if you do that organic path yeah yeah I've seen I've seen quite a few organizations go and create a ton of SharePoint sites for all their various groups and areas and things like that and then teams and then I'm going hang on a second but if you create a Microsoft team team it gives you a group it gives you a SharePoint and then they've got two and I'm like guys are you know they don't understand the architecture really important because I've seen one IT fellow create a hundred and three SharePoint sites straight off the bat and made it just a oh look made a mess so yeah think about it yeah it's funny you know sometimes okay and being able to figure out how to get out of the math you know one thing I've noticed a lot of times is people that aren't familiar with teams and the fact that you're editing the file real time maybe Heather has a presentation I like the presentation but I don't realize that I'm actively changing Heather's version in teams so things like making it read only by default or changing certain aspects or explaining those aspects of this is being changed real time explaining to users you still have version history if somebody did mess up your file can be really helpful and then you don't need five or ten different separate copies that's a big thing exactly we don't need final final final final final final final final final well it's one of the things I mean where we started talking about governance you know having you know discussion about governance and part of that is exactly you brought up brought up is you know what what are the constraints that we need to have in the system what are the life cycle management what like what are we legally bound to go and do to save your backup archival of data our treatment of data kind of all those things that may already be defined for your organization so that also needs to play in if you go into building something new if it's truly a green field you're rolling out building an internet you know for the first time using SharePoint the more that you can be aware of okay what are these constraints around the system then you don't it's not going to limit you later on what you can do you already know what the rules are the guide the guardrails for the collaboration and then you build within that and then let people like one of my favorite things is to to go and build the provisioning templates there's a number of there's third-party tools there's things you can do out of the box sort of but you go build those in just so that people don't have to worry about setting the lifecycle management setting the right policies what are our sharing standards kind of all of those other things it's already established the guardrails are in so I know when I go to create a team or a SharePoint site I get to pick from the menu the options that are available to me already maybe they're still an approval process which is another thing that you need to discuss but again it you know go and figure out from governance with the guardrails have those build that into as you go and pilot in the workshop these things out and it's going to make it a lot easier for people so don't they don't get excited about something only to feel like they're getting pulled back no you can't do it or can't do it that way yeah now from an education perspective I also found that if they're creating from teams folders and everything they're creating that from there there's less mess than if they go straight to SharePoint and they start creating folders from there and then they've got files and folders that aren't attached inside the teams because it sits outside of it some of the other things that are kind of best practice like that training and education of where do they start from and if they're going to create what does it actually mean for best practice when it comes to collaborate because otherwise they find that they're losing stuff but they haven't really they just have put it in a place that it's difficult I know that recent feature has saved my time so many times in either teams or one drive just if I've recently worked on it I don't necessarily have to remember which team was I in or what is this in my one drive what folder did I store it under super helpful yeah and I mean if you're rolling at SharePoint have you rolled out one drive to go with it you know really an important component a lot of these things go hand in hand and you know so that they can work from their desktop and continue to be able to you know work that way because purely working online construct a lot of users can struggle see what I meant Bethany can of worms we talk for an hour it's a lot all day yeah yeah yeah well it's a big it's a huge topic so yes it's a huge 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