We are in the early stages of moving all of our Network shares to SharePoint. Our church staff is broken up into functional groups, such as Global Outreach, Adults, HR, Accounting, etc. Each of these groups has an associated network share. Additionally, we have a Public network share containing files that are accessible to all groups. Staff can have more than one mapped Network share. Not really sure what the right question to ask. I realize that the move from on premise network shares to O365 teams/groups is a paradigm shift. Consequently I’m really not sure the best way to design a good solution. My plan is to create a O365 Team for each of our functional groups. What do i do about the public share? What does on premise file access look like? Do i somehow sync the functional group libraries to a central server and map drives to them or do i sync the files to the staffs’ local computers. if we move each functional group one at a time to the cloud then it seems we would have a sort of “hybrid” situation where some files would be in the cloud and the others would be on premise until all groups are moved to the cloud. I need some direction. If someone could point me to some good resources that would be a great start.
Hi Ron, you’ll need to be aware that the backend for teams/groups is Sharepoint and so you can think of O365 groups as off-site Sharepoint site collections with file libraries with all the caveats that entails. Be careful with how you sync those group files as syncing will all go through your internet connection and that can really gum up your internet connection depending on how it gets used. There are groups, teams, and yammer which also fit into the collaboration plan to round out how people will work. It all kind of looks like this:
You should definitely read this:
You might need to leave multimedia heavy departments local, there is also the possibility that you will need to run a file syncing solution that is LAN/WAN aware (like Dropbox).
One resource that I have referred to are the articles written on SharepointMaven.com Here is one article to get you started. How to manage SharePoint Implementation I’m not saying that this is a definitive resource, but just one to get you thinking through some implementation questions.
This is great information. Thank you for giving me a starting point
Hey, ran across this today. It details some of the GPO settings for syncing files. If you have AD you’ll probably want to go ahead and force files on-demand for the team sites.
(edit… forgot to paste in the site)
Excellent article. thank you.
I’m going through the same thing as we speak. My plan of action is to create a sharepoint site for each “department” share. I lock down the site to only being document storage. I’ve also turned off everyone’s ability to create teams. As I setup a sharepoint site I also create a corresponding security group within 0365 and assign it as a member to the site. That way I can just drop people in and they automatically get access. For windows users, I’m then mapping a drive to the sharepoint site. For Mac users, I’m still figuring that out. At this point I’m teaching people to navigate the site through the office product they’re using. It works really nicely that way, as long as it’s an office file.
thank you for your input. this is great info