Welcome back to the third instalment of our Microsoft Teams mini series. This week, we’re going to be delving into document collaboration in both SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
Transcript:
“Hey, everybody, Lee, from Everything Tech. This week’s video is another one of those aimed at helping you guys get the best out of Office 365. As nerds, we use these technologies every day, but for the most part you guys don’t know that they exist, and these small, short videos are aimed at helping you get the best out of the products.
“This week, we’re going to cover Office 365 document collaboration and sharing using Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, and hopefully, you’ll be able to implement these tools and technologies in your business to help make you more efficient.
I imagine most people will be used to working in the old way, which is where you have a Windows Explorer window and these yellow folders. The modern way of working, and the collaborative way of working is to do everything in a browser or in an application like Microsoft Teams, which gives you a single pane of glass to go for all of your work.
“On the left hand side here, I’m logged in as a test account, and I’ve got everything test side up, which shows all our documents and folders. This is a direct replacement for these yellow folders here.
“On the right hand side, I decided just to use Microsoft Teams, so this is actually logged in as me. Microsoft Teams, I don’t want to keep blurting on about that in these videos, but it really is going to be a fantastic tool for you to communicate and collaborate.
“You can see, I’ve got a document here, an internet and an email policy. I’m going to click it, and what happens is it fires up Microsoft Word inside a browser window. Now, I get the vast majority of the features that you want to use in Microsoft Word are in the bar across the top here. Most of what you need to do on a daily basis in Word is here.
“I’m going to go ahead and open the same document in Microsoft Teams. What I’m doing is is just literally opening the same thing in the cloud. Now, when I make changes on either side, what happens is they’re immediately reflected on the other person’s computer as well. You see, when I put an S in here, the S appears here and it tells me me who’s using the document on the other side.
“Now, this I useful for a couple of reasons. One is, you no doubt will have had that problem before where somebody sends a document to six or seven people and everybody makes their edits and then sends it back to them. You’ve no idea which is the latest version of the document and which one is the most current and all that kind of stuff. Obviously, this completely eliminates that, because you’ve got everybody collaborating on exactly the same thing.
“Everything auto saves automatically in the cloud. There’s no need to ever hit the save button. It’s saving as you go. As you can see, as one person’s changing things, it’s telling me that that person’s changing it and that the changes are being reflected.
“It’s also really good for security, because you never have to worry about the document getting lost or getting into the wrong hands because everybody’s accessing it in your secure cloud. There’s no problems with people emailing it to the wrong person or it getting put on a USB stick and getting lost or anything like that. That’s a really positive thing as well.
“You can tell what’s happened with the document, because in SharePoint, when you’re editing online, all the changes that people are making are all being kept in the version history table, so if I click on the document and click ‘version history,’ here you go, you can tell that … what’s happened. What’s happened in the lifetime of the document, what changes have been made. You could even revert back to those changes if you think that somebody’s gone a bit too far and messed around with your document too much, you can restore the previous version.
“That’s just a really basic initial look at how document collaboration works in SharePoint and Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. It’s far better than using the old yellow folders and means that you can work far more collaboratively.
“If you want to talk to us about improving the way you work and being a more collaborative business, then give us a call and we’re happy to come out and talk through your needs and answer any questions. Everything Tech are experts in Microsoft SharePoint, so we can handle all aspects from migrations to managed support. Get in touch with us today for expert advice.”
