The Below transcript was generated using AI from Episode 9 of the Level Up M365 Podcast there will be typos.
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Episode 9 where to save M365 Data SharePoint versus teams versus OneDrive Hi all welcome to the level Up M365 podcast. We are a show here where we talk about the.
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Router in 365 collaboration apps for I would say pros, system admins and CEOs.
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Today’s topics we’re going to talk a little bit about. Let’s see here 1st and go into the preamble of the day, a few posts on the message center that stuck out to me. We have a topic of the day and this is kind of where I dive deep into a particular topic, technology or workflow within the M365.
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Platform and we’re going to end.
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Off with the tip of the day.
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So before we get right into the content, let’s go into the sponsor. Again. I like the last show the sponsor for today is me and I’m on my knees. I’m pleading, I’m begging. If it if you know you, you can hear the tone in my voice. That is, if you like what you see.
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Here I have been. I’ve had. I’ve had some minor sponsors asking me to, you know, write some content to review some content. I don’t know if that’s a conflict of interest, so I’m just kind of letting that simmer in in the background. There are some third party tools I use to to do software development and.
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Enterprise administration, I don’t know where I land on that yet. So right now I’m the only sponsor.
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Share my content. I have a tip jar if if if you you know want. If you’re inclined to do that tip jars on the main site but just share anything that I’ve got including this episode. That’s the best way to sponsor.
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Me.
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OK, so now let’s go into the preamble. So the preamble is.
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But just a brief segment to talk about something personal, and I recently parted ways with my 2020-2021 iPad Pro. I’m gonna take a sip of coffee here.
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The iPad Pro 12.9 this is the first. This was the first iPad with the M1 chip. That was a revolutionary device for me. I paired that up with the Magic keyboard and this isn’t the show about Apple, but I’ll keep this brief, I promise.
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I paired that up with the Magic keyboard and I said goodbye to the laptop.
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And I mean I coded on that. I did a lot of my work tasks on that. You know, I have a small like everybody. I support all the user support including the content you see on this website or derived from that device in some form a lot of even recordings.
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So that that was a phenomenal device because I I said goodbye to the power cord, I could throw that magic keyboard in my book bag and go anywhere, including survive a pandemic. So it’s it’s the only reason why I said goodbye to it.
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Was I needed a real full web browser for the different hats that I play? I need a web browser that has multiple profiles, so because of that I have traded it for an older M1 model MacBook Air.
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And so far, I’m loving it. I’ve I’m I’m I use an iMac as my full computing device, so you know there was no learning curve there, but.
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The the MacBook Air has been great. Again, I don’t have to use my battery. I don’t have to use my charging cord. I just have this thing going all the time. And yeah, it’s a phenomenal device and I got it old. It’s a few years and this isn’t the brand new stuff, but.
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One little tip on how I was able to get away with using a tablet as a full on computing device. I have a lot of remote machines so I would remote into when I needed to use a a full operating system or an IDE. I would just remote into a Windows machine or I’d remote into my iMac and the iPad.
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To me, well, for that, I still use that flow.
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All right, message center. Radar. So I have 3 topics today. These are things to keep an eye out for. And sometimes I will have things that are already out. You just don’t know about it. And I do that in a delay so I can use it out in the field and kind of give you some experience. So some of the things you see here are.
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You know, stuff that’s coming in the pipeline. Others are things that have been out for a while and you just they’re.
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Hidden in the background.
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So the first one of today is I’m going to read it title for title, Microsoft OneDrive for Business Control, Colored Folders and OneDrive folder in Microsoft Windows File Explorer.
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This is a.
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Cool little thing. I really like this. The colored folders in SharePoint, they’ve been out for a while at least at least a year.
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But now your colored folders will cascade down. If you’re using the OneDrive shortcut, I believe they’ll cascade down into your local file system. This is another reason one of many why I recommend not using the the sync button that appears in your SharePoint document library.
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But rather using the OneDrive shortcut, I did a full episode.
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On that OneDrive sync versus what episode was that OneDrive seeing? If you’re familiar, if you’re curious about.
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Let’s see here.
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Yeah, I think it’s episode 5. Yeah, episode 5. I did a podcast talking more about the SharePoint sync versus the OneDrive shortcut and the spoiler for that is the OneDrive shortcut is superior in every way. But now folders that you color in.
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The web app.
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We’re going to cascade over into File Explorer, which is amazing and one of the reasons why I really like this feature is within SharePoint. A lot of people don’t.
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How can I say this? The private folder strategy isn’t typically decided up front. It’s kind of organically happens and and the problem with or you know, deciding about deciding private folders after the fact within SharePoint or OneDrive is.
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You don’t really, unless you use the name private. You don’t really know. You don’t have any indicate indicator that.
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There’s there’s private data in there. Or what? If you have lots of clients and you make a a private folder per client. By the way, I don’t recommend this if you want private folders. I do I’ll I’ll I’ll reference some other things, but before I get distracted, the reason why I like this colored folder idea.
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Is in lieu of making a private folder on a on a separate SharePoint site, which I do recommend. You could do a color-coded folder you know make it red for example.
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That could be one indicator of the data being private. Of course you can use. You can create your own schema of what each color means, but that’s that’s one use case that I would use is. I would mark my private folders as read, but in terms of actually making private content.
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When I the end users, I support the clients I support when they say what’s the quickest way of doing a private folder in SharePoint or teams? I actually refer them to the teams private.
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Panel depending on their level of technical sophistication, you know you can take, you can have a dedicated SharePoint site depending on the use case, you could have a dedicated SharePoint site. I typically do that for external clients. This is when you want to share data outside of your company. I’ll I’ll recommend a separate site, but if you just want to you know.
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Button Drive private folder.
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For whatever reason, you can do it in SharePoint. You can have a, you know, a dedicated document library that’s private, or you can have a subfolder which is private. That doesn’t scale very well for the reasons I indicated. How are you going to remember that they’re private and managing access can be a little tricky. So what I typically recommend for those who want to do private.
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Folders is I’ll do a private channel within teams.
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I like that for.
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General End users because the private channel gives you that lot graphic, which is a nice visual separation from the other content to indicate that it’s a private channel. So anyway, back to code folders, this is ID MC 878504 and release should be.
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Mid-september, so it might go, it might go all the way into October before that actually percolates out to your tenant going into the second one.
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The second item is Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams update out new Microsoft List rollout. So what is this? Microsoft SharePoint and list in teams and updated list. This will introduces new features users including including the ability to add ratings. That’s why I added it. I couldn’t remember why I added this.
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Items so you can add ratings.
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You can drag and paste images directly into the list and you can see who’s collaborating, collaborating with you in real time. You can switch views by clicking tabs. That’s actually a cool one too. Switching views by clicking tabs. I didn’t like it at first, but it’s very quick, but I put this on there. I put this fella on here as an.
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In a rating situation, I love the idea of having a rating. This is before I start, you know, going on my soapbox. This one is MC 891238 and it is.
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Going to begin rolling out in September 2024 and expect to be complete by October. So I would say probably early November you can probably plan on seeing it. But why I like this is let’s say you have a idea for a marketing campaign or a new feature that you want to add to an.
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App.
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Or you have a help desk ticket and you need. You need feedback. You need people to give a thumbs up and this the rating system. I haven’t seen this, but why? Why I like this in theory is you can throw a list of items a list of features and then folks can go out and vote on that. It’s pretty hard to do that.
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Without doing something custom like a power app.
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So I really like that ability to be able to vote and and upvote things out-of-the-box, and this is the last item here. This is more of a cautionary tale, a caution than a not a not a tale, but a caution than a feature. And this is Microsoft forms. So there is a a new.
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Sync solution for the Excel sinker. You know if you have Microsoft forms you can have a a process that takes the forms and syncs them to an Excel spreadsheet and you know you can distribute that spread.
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Cheat however way you want. Really cool out-of-the-box stuff. I’m not the biggest fan of using using XLS a data source, but still a very cool feature. This is what is it MC.
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855685 and late September I believe I did a blog post on this where it says through September to January.
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That’s when they’re going to start rolling out the change. You want to really take. Take note again, all the links to what we talked about today is going to be in the show notes you want to take action on this because if you do nothing, the sync between your Microsoft forms and your.
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Excel lost. Lost it there, dogs.
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The sync between your Microsoft forms and Excel will break. So if you take no action, you’re probably going to have the business interruption there. In my environments for the the end users I support, they’re they’re having a Microsoft forum for lots of pretty important business processes for intake forms, so.
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Definitely. If you have any forms and you support any end users, take note of this. This update to follow the instructions on the show notes on how to update your Excel file.
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Late September 2024 is when this is starting and I believe it goes out to January, but don’t take my word for it. Look at the link in the show notes. All right, I think that’s all we have for this segment. OK. So now we’re going to go into today’s comment and that is about the table here on where should we store things.
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So just to kind of get into this and level set with these SharePoint apps OneDrive, we’ve got OneDrive, teams, SharePoint feed engage and loop and all these apps are a SharePoint app or SharePoint on the back end.
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Microsoft does this because it scales really well and as an admin I don’t have to reinvent the wheel in terms of governance and automation. And the nice part is you you might see car manufacturers do a similar thing. This is kind of a parallel where the in the 80’s the Chrysler had.
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The the the 80s and 90s, they had the Plymouth Voyager Dodge Caravan minivan set, and those were both on the K car platform.
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And the the value of that platform and I’ll, I’ll tie this back into SharePoint here in a minute, is they built lots of different cars, economy cars, luxury cars with that same platform. They just changed the top end, you know frame or the top end portion of the car. You know whether it’s a minivan or a luxury car.
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Based on the use case, but the body, the assembly line, the parts, all that stayed the same, the same scenario can be said here where.
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You’ve got a SharePoint OneDrive retention policy. Those same rules, configurations, those apps can cascade down to the other apps and services based on the need and the Nice part is so you know. So one of the reasons why they do this is it saves you time. You could take a OneDrive folder, authorize an end user.
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Perspective. You could take a OneDrive folder and.
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You could, you know, add sharing permissions to each folder and create business units within your OneDrive folder, but it would not scale well. The reverse is true for SharePoint. You could go into SharePoint, make a series of private folders per employee, but it’d be an administrative nightmare. So by having these verticals like OneDrive, SharePoint.
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Teams.
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They scale a lot. You know you’re saving time. They’re just verticals on top of SharePoint. So that being said, when do we use, you know, said particular app, there’s a Venn diagram of overlapping features. I have a few, I would call them rules of thumb on the table that I that I would recommend it’s.
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We’re gonna be in the show notes of the long form blog post will be in the show notes of of this this podcast, but you’ll use OneDrive, you know, bar none. OneDrive use it for personal document storage.
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You could also say store your draft copies in OneDrive. You know that totally your your point. If if they do anything, if you take you know your one take away from this podcast is embrace cloud storage and definitely embrace OneDrive as your default de facto place for storing stuff until you know where it.
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Goes if you know where the documents going to go. If you know it’s got a different requirement then you know being your personal storage fine start your draft and SharePoint, that’s your you know that’s your prerogative. But embrace all things OneDrive have your desktop, your downloads folder, all that stuff sync to the cloud so you’re not up a Creek. Should there be any.
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You know, system local system failures so so you use OneDrive for personal documents.
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Manage SharePoint is primarily a repository for publicly accessible documents. You could also kind of put team documents as well if you’re working on a team and you decide to house your project within SharePoint, you can do that because you have the SharePoint pages for your reports and each SharePoint has those beautiful document libraries.
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Teams is kind of the same.
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Like SharePoint and I actually messed up SharePoint is also primarily used for one way broad communication like Internets. Teams isn’t typically used in that one way broad communication workflow you can, but it’s primarily built, you know it’s got a limit on how many people.
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Can be in the team.
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It’s primarily built for folks to have projects that where they’re collaborating in the Nice part, the real kind of delimiter between SharePoint and teams. Obviously teams is.
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A SharePoint site on the back end, but the main delimiter on deciding between what platform is do you need that posting feature? That posting functionality which is.
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The fact of that post gives you a nice little kind of almost real time chat type situation where you can post news and meeting minutes there and each tab in a Microsoft team has its own post. So it is a cool little setup if you want that type of real time communication.
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Aviva Engage is kind of like an internal social network, a book club. A CEO asked me any anything a.
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Lot of other.
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Things and use cases. I’ve also used Aviva engaged me to house user groups. It is, you know, has a larger user, larger users can be.
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Speak it can have a larger user base than a Microsoft team, so it is primarily meant for those employee experience situations where you need you know, the entire company or the entire region to have input. Some considerations with teams and with Viva engaged is you have a feed in teams, you have a post and you engage, you have a feed.
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You do want to consider moderation. It you know these are they can. They can store documents, but you can also post to those and you have to decide, am I going to allow only admins to post? What if someone gets in there and they start trolling the the feed distracting people as opposed to helping? So definitely there’s some considerations you want to use.
00:19:17
To think about and and all of these apps have their own adoption path. I would recommend keeping that document and then I’d say lastly, you’ve got the venerable.
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Loop and loop traditionally isn’t used for housing documents, but as I mentioned and I’ll post a link in the show notes, it is getting a file upload feature. There’s some gotchas to that file upload feature. I don’t recommend, it’s not in, it’s not in GA and so it the file upload feature to loop is probably going to change.
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But there’s nuance to it where the files are not really stored, a hyperlink stored, and it’s kind of confusing, so I would not say loop is your go to for document storage as of right now, but wind.
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Use when to use loop would be when you when you value real time collaboration. The best example I can see is you’re doing an e-mail draft with a team of people or the teams collaboration notes which I think is episode 6 a loop, a loop component and even meeting minutes meeting notes.
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Five teams is a loop.
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It is so cool to see the meeting minutes in real time. I can’t recommend it enough. How awesome that is. I do e-mail drafts and loops. You can do status updates and loop, but another good use case is if you have like a long knowledge base that you’ve created out of a loop page. You can take sections of that knowledge base.
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And you can post sections of that they call those loop components. So you can kind of compartmentalize sections of a loop page and that the you can share that with e-mail and you can share that in the teams chat and the nice part about that is as the data gets updated, it’s going to be available on all those spots.
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The common use case I use a loop component for would be.
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Meeting minutes like tasks that come out of meeting minutes. I use OneNote as my my prime thing for meeting minutes, but you I typically put in a loop component task board. I know this is a lot of this is a cognitive load here. It’s easier.
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If I have.
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A visual, but by doing your meeting minutes in a loop task board.
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You can recycle that same template you know if you have a reoccurring meeting you can just recycle the same template and that loop component is always going to be up to date. Really looking at the full write up to get that table come.
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Person.
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What I talk about here is in my notes here is private data. I typically if you need to use private data within these, you know private folder.
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You can make a private folder within a SharePoint site. You can make you know depending on your use case there.
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But for the the the non non techie for the layman individual when when, when somebody comes to me they say they want a series of private data private folders. One thing to consider is with SharePoint you don’t really have a visual on on a private folder it it it’s not unless you you know put it in the name or use the color.
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Voting it’s not clear. There’s no graphic to say that this folder is private, so it’s easy to get it confused as opposed to creating a private channel in teams, you have a nice little lock icon, and I really like that. I like that you get, you know, and people who don’t have access to that private channel don’t even see that.
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Channel. So it’s it’s it’s really neat that they they they have the graphic.
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To indicate to an admin or an owner that hey, this is a private area, be real.
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Don’t just willingly add people. Those are some things to think about. Another thing to think about in terms of requirements for document storage is external access. Now I know some individuals that will just take a folder, you know, called vendors, and they’ll just share that folder out with vendors and.
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You know non employees can access this content. SharePoint does allow external access.
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That’s a big problem because it’s just not a good security practice. I would recommend having a dedicated separate SharePoint site for your or or separate Microsoft team for your external individuals, your external customers or vendors.
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So that’s really all I have on you know where to store what the different use cases.
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On the table I talked about permission management ownership with loop. There is a complicated ownership model, but it basically it, generally speaking ownership with loop depends on the the author of the of the content who created it that based on where they created it. The retention can be a little sticky.
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So another, there were some omissions related to this this post that I’ve I’ve put I’ve I’ve created and some of the omissions on where to store things is first Azure files Azure files is another. It does not fall within. These omissions don’t fall within.
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Actually, one of these omissions do, but Azure files does not fall within the M365 standard license, so the it’s just a file share, not stored on your infrastructure. A file share stored on Microsoft’s infrastructure. There’s other things to it, but Long story short, if you need a traditional file share.
00:24:39
Azure files may be 11 route. You could consider a better option I think for or I well I don’t want to say better option but definitely a more popular option is Azure blobs.
00:24:51
Storage as your BLOB storage is generally cheaper than Azure files for cold storage use cases and this is what I like BLOB storage. Better you can put retention labels on it, so sensitivity stuff like that classification. I don’t believe you can do that with Azure files so you’ve got data there. That’s just kind of there ungoverned. You don’t know the nature of it.
00:25:12
There’s there’s risks with that. Another thing that I omitted from this table is a SharePoint list attachments button and that is if you’ve ever created a SharePoint list, you have the out-of-the-box. I think it’s enabled by default is the.
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Attachments feature, so if you.
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Create a list within SharePoint you you can just attach a screenshot or attach a document. I don’t recommend using that for storage retention because it you to make changes to that you have to download it locally, make save it locally, make your changes then.
00:25:50
Be uploaded and what if someone else does the same action? Now you have a conflict. Who wins? It’s very confusing. Confusing. So I would recommend.
00:25:59
Not using that attachments button for files and leveraging the document library. So when you create a SharePoint list, if you want documents attached to that list, link out to a document library somewhere.
00:26:12
The Nice part of that attachments feature is if you’re using a SharePoint list as a help desk mechanism, there is a way for them to upload screenshots, but in most cases I would not recommend using that attachment button as a file storage solution. OK, so that is all I have for the content.
00:26:33
Onto the tip of the week.
00:26:36
All right for our tip of the week, I’m going to go ahead and just post a few bullet points and that is if you are interested in Microsoft Loop. It is evolving. I listen to a hour long ask me anything that the Interzone podcast posted. I’ll I’ll put a link to that in the show notes and really cool.
00:26:57
Talk a lot of people, a lot of lot of knowledgeable people from the product team in there and what I like these are just two takeaways that I liked was loop will not be replacing one note. They didn’t say one note explicitly. They said loop won’t be replacing any.
00:27:12
The other in 365 product, it will never have feature parity with OneNote, so that gives me clarity like kind of vindication of what I’ve been saying. That loop is more of a SharePoint page. It’s an app built to complement these apps. They also ask will loop ever be, you know maybe become a.
00:27:32
Database, you know, like a traditional structured database like a SharePoint list or SQL and didn’t seem like that was anything they wanted to keep, you know, because Microsoft already offers those those solutions. Microsoft already offers SharePoint List SQL data versus if you want that type of data storage model the loop.
00:27:52
Is is kind of a quick and dry, quick and easy. Here’s you know here as.
00:27:57
But they have been enhancing the table component functionality to have more database like situations which is great. Really like again. Like I said, it’s pretty cool. The last thing on the tip of the week is a link out to my own article where I go in depth about the files upload feature that is.
00:28:17
In preview for Microsoft.
00:28:19
Loop. I kind of show a video of what’s going on, how the the upload isn’t really an upload, it’s kind of creating this weird dynamic link. I don’t like it at its current state, I see value absolutely and being able to upload files to a loop workspace, but how they’re talking about doing it right now I see I.
00:28:39
I know I check it out, give them some feedback. Microsoft does listen. Give them some feedback on this and that’s why I’m sharing it. That’s all I have for the tip of the week, fellas. If fellas, lady.
00:28:52
If you like this type of content, you know, be sure to check it out level up in 365.com you know if you have any questions, post them on wherever you found this, check out the socials and if you like to support my content, my effort here really all you can do at this point.
00:29:12
Is share the share it share it on your social network and I do have a tip jar. If you want to buy me a beer. But that’s completely optional. It’s your call. But sharing is the best way to get the word out. Thank you everybody for listening and I will talk to you later.
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