Recently I’ve been working with several clients who are moving to Office 365 and migrating from network drives to SharePoint Online. It reminded me that while I spend a lot of time working with people who already have exposure to SharePoint, this new wave of people are first timers.

The SharePoint Team Site is the basic building block of a Document-centric SharePoint environment. If you are building a site for collaboration, document management, storing contracts, client information or project information this is the place to start. This video gives an overview of some of the common features.

Microsoft Teams use a Team Site to store document content accessed through the “Files” Tab in a Channel. Teams stores files in the default Document Library. You can start by creating a Microsoft Team or “Teamify” an existing Modern Team Site.

In Modern SharePoint there are policies and features that are configured at the “Site” level. When deciding when to use a single Site vs multiple Sites, consider these settings:

• Office 365 Group based permissions (Owners, Members, Visitors)
• Guests in Teams are also Guests in SharePoint if the site is linked to a Microsoft Team
• External Sharing policy – can the sites content be shared with external people
• Retention Policy – for managing content retention
• Sensitivity Labels – for Enterprise licensed Office 365
• Hub Site association
• Classic SharePoint site collection features

It is good practice to design your site structure with permissions in mind. Avoid mixing sensitive content with more generally accessible content. For those sites with sensitive content, consider the external sharing policy and have tighter control on membership of the related Office 365 Group.

You can have more granular permissions on Libraries within a Team Site, for example a library for Manager only documents that is visible to the Manager but not other people with access to the Site. The issue with more granular permissions is they mix Office 365 Group access with either SharePoint native permissions or directly added users, making permissions harder to understand and manage.

Other things to consider include the site naming convention, global navigation requirements and content life-cycle.

If you are new to SharePoint, my YouTube Channel has a variety of videos to introduce features and explain some of the common features.

More Resources:

• Site Architecture: Structuring SharePoint Online
• Managing Controlled Documents with SharePoint Online