Microsoft Teams is one of the most powerful chat-based collaboration tools delivered to organizations. But, thanks to close integration with applications which are part of the Microsoft 365 Suite, you can achieve even more within the application.
Teams aligns many Microsoft applications, including OneNote, Planner, and Power BI, so you can focus solely on collaboration rather than each individual collaboration tool. The most beneficial application to use alongside the Teams toolkit is SharePoint because it can greatly extend the way your team works.
Whatever teams are created in Microsoft Teams – internally it creates a team site on SharePoint. Users and team members do not need to directly open the SharePoint site – they can just use Teams and they can access documents and files stored in SharePoint. There are several advantages to storing Teams documents in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business:
- The OneDrive sync client works on Windows or Mac, so it’s easy to sync all the files for a Team
- Teams allows for document co-authoring and accessing online versions of Microsoft applications
- SharePoint provides previews for more than 300 file types, which are displayed directly in the Teams file tab
- SharePoint has comprehensive data governance and compliance features, so Teams documents are protected as well.
- Files are discoverable in Delve and SharePoint search
Users don’t have to leave Teams to work with their files; they appear in the Files tab. There’s an “Open in SharePoint” option that brings you right into the SharePoint site. It’s also possible to add SharePoint pages as tabs in Teams. This provides a much easier approach to building tabs compared with the typical approach of building a custom website from scratch. All the information on a team site home page can appear there, providing the best of both SharePoint and Teams in the same user interface.
Microsoft 365 — including Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive — is designed to be a universal toolkit to give your team members integrated and flexible ways to work for their projects and tasks. If you’re interested in expanding collaboration at your organization with these tools, contact us today to get started.
