Sharing Documents across Private Teams, SharePoint Document Libraries to the rescue

Introduction

Sensible companies have either only implemented Teams Communications functions when COVID started or did take their time for a Teams design and more importantly creating Teams Governance.

To me good Teams Governance is amongst other things about creating a Teams Structure that is both recognizable to your users as well as preventing users from being a member of many (private) Teams, containing many Channels consisting of multiple folders and subfolders, sub-subfolders, sub-sub-subfolders etc. Without proper Teams Governance, Teams will just become an expensive Fileserver with WhatsApp capabilities and improved search.

Once you did setup this Teams Structure as part of your Teams Governance, you will notice that there always will be situations where people from different (private) Teams need to work with each other and they suggestion will come in to create more Teams for this...or even worse; Private Channels in Teams (which is yuck from an Architecture and Admin perspective and limited to 30 Channels per Team anyways)

The good news is that this demand often can easily be facilitated without having to create additional Teams or Private Channels:

Ad-Hoc - use a chatgroup of in Teams

For Ad-Hoc purposes, and this is probably already being used in your Company if you use Teams, any user can start a multi-person chat, resulting in an Ad-Hoc Chat Group. By default (and with OneDrive enabled) files can also be shared in such a Chat Group.

Structurally - SharePoint Document Libraries

If you are looking for a more structural setup and capabilities that are similar to the "files" capabilities in Teams you can use individual SharePoint Document Libraries to facilitate cross-team file collaboration, without creating an additional (private) Team.

Lets look at an Contoso example where there is a Private Team for the Finance Department and a Private Team for the IT Department. People from Finance and from IT regularly need to collaborate on files related to IT spend and budget and need functionality such as versioning, co-authoring and check-in, check-out.

Contoso's Teams Policy states that the number of Teams should be kept to a minimum to prevent users from needing to be a member of too many Teams and loose sight of where information can be accessed.

To solve the issue at hand the following solution is implemented using a SharePoint, on which Teams Files functionality is build anyways

1. A SharePoint Online Site is created which is not connected to an Office 365 Group. This Site is called "Cross Team Collaboration"
2. A Document Library "Finance and IT Budget plus Spend Reporting" is created
3. The Owners of the Finance Team are made Owners of this Document Library
4. The Owners of the IT Team are made Owners of this Document Library
5. The Finance and IT's Teams owners add the appropriate users as members (modify) or visitors (read) groups of the Finance and IT Budget plus Spend Reporting" Document Library
6. The Document Library is added as a "Tab" in the appropriate channel in the Finance Department's Team
   
   
   
   
7. The Document Library is added as a "Tab" in the appropriate channel in the IT Department's Team

Now applicable members of both Teams are able to continue to use Teams as their "landing zone" for Work and cooperate on documents using the Tabs added in both Teams using the SharePoint Document Library created for this purpose.

For comparable situations additional Document Libraries can be created in the same SharePoint Site created for this purpose, thus keeping it all simple to administer as well.

Sander Eek
Managing Partner
HCS Company Microsoft Services B.V.