Microsoft IT Showcase

Understanding file sharing and

collaboration options Microsoft IT has become a cloud-first organization. Our cloud solutions provide flexibility for a variety of collaboration

scenarios, enable us to discover and manage data, provide continuity, manage the document lifecycle, and enforce

business policies.

We are challenging employees to change behaviors that are mostly driven by habit. We are looking at ways to help

employees understand the cloud solutions that are available to help them quickly make the best choice, each time,

based on their business scenario and collaboration needs. Information workers in today’s workplace need to work

together. Microsoft Office 365 facilitates independent work, teamwork in real time, and everything in between.

One example is file sharing. We have been actively moving Microsoft employees away from the practice of sharing

files in email and then manually managing versions as a form of collaboration. While Outlook 2016 remains one of the

primary communication tools at Microsoft, there are better ways to collaborate. Cloud collaboration provides a safe,

central location for collaboration, with managed, identity-based access from anywhere and on any device. And

Outlook 2016 makes it very easy to include a link to your file shared in the cloud instead of sending an attachment.

Where to save and how to collaborate You have choices about how to work in Office 365. The features you choose can be based on a variety of factors—

including the size of the audience, your work habits, and culture of your team. We encourage employees to decide

the appropriate place to save their work and then decide which application to use to collaborate.

Figure 1. File sharing and collaboration meter

There are no fixed rules because how you work depends on the audience, their habits, and your intentions. Your work

can range from individual file creation to broad document sharing, so different tools can help you accomplish your

goals:

OneDrive for Business is a place to start when you have only a file or two and you’re not ready to share with the

broader team. You can easily share it with a couple of your colleagues to get their input.

SharePoint is the solution for sharing files and creating workflows with your team.

Yammer is a good choice for finding and connecting with others across the organization who are interested in

similar topics. New groups provide a team site, OneNote, and other collaboration assets for your team.

Use Outlook 2016 or Outlook.com if email is the way you and your team are accustomed to communicating.

Groups can have a shared inbox, calendar, team site, and OneNote for collaboration.

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IT Showcase Article

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After you decide where you want to store files, you can decide what application you want to use to collaborate. We

advise our users to choose tools, such as Yammer or Outlook, that work best for the culture of their team and what

they’re trying to accomplish, and then start a collaboration group.

At Microsoft, we have business policies that describe how to protect sensitive content by considering the audience,

their freedom to share content, and the lifecycle of the content (reviewed once or developed through many versions).

We help employees describe the sensitivity of their content so that we can direct them to appropriate solutions.

NOTE: Policies at Microsoft define which technologies can be used to safely store and share high business

impact (HBI), medium business impact (MBI), and low business (LBI) information. For more information

about how we protect and manage Microsoft data, see Protecting and managing Microsoft data with

SharePoint governance.

Using OneDrive for Business to store and share your files We encourage our employees to use Microsoft OneDrive for Business as their individual business file library. OneDrive

for Business safely stores your files in the cloud. OneDrive for Business is the preferred choice for business documents

that don’t require collaboration or that don’t need to be shared with your team. By default, files saved to OneDrive for

Business are private, unless you place them in a shared folder or intentionally share them. OneDrive for Business

makes it easy to access and sync your files from anywhere, on any device.

OneDrive for Business is still a good choice for collaborating and sharing your files, even if they have a limited scope

or lifecycle. For example, if you create a blog post and would like your colleagues to review it before you post it. In

this case, you expect to use the document once without needing additional storage or context information.

Some advantages of using OneDrive for Business, from an IT perspective, include:

Files are not stored on a user’s hard drive. Cloud storage is more secure, has continuity, and is accessible to

employees even when their primary device is not.

It’s discoverable for the people it is shared with.

We can apply policies and governance.

Using SharePoint to collaborate with your team Groups in Outlook and Yammer provide a SharePoint team site for collaboration. Other team members can view and

collaborate on your documents on the team site.

SharePoint site ownership and permissions can include a wide collection of people. Check-in workflows can be

created to assign your document to the next person in line when a reviewer checks it in. If a document is important to

the success of your project, it is important that team members can access it, even if the original author is no longer

working on the project. In SharePoint Online, permissions are granted on a site basis, with the option to uniquely

share or restrict individual documents. If you have access to the team site, then you typically have access to

documents stored on the site.

Some advantages of using SharePoint, from an IT perspective, include:

Files are not stored on a user’s hard drive. Cloud storage is more secure, has continuity, and is accessible to

employees even when their primary device is not.

Sites and content discoverable through search. Team-specific metadata can be added to further improve search

results.

We can apply policies and governance.

SharePoint provides us better control over permissions.

We can apply lifecycle management and workflows, and version histories are available.

Shared content remains available even as team members change. If a team member leaves for a vacation, their

team can still share their work.

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IT Showcase Article

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Collaboration through membership in Office 365 Groups Office 365 Groups is a group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365 and equips

them with a set of group collaboration assets, such as shared messaging, calendar, SharePoint team site, OneNote

notebook, and the ability to “meet now” on Skype. Office 365 Groups is also fully integrated with SharePoint, Skype

for Business, OneNote, Planner, Power BI, and Dynamics CRM—which means you can create a new group, see and

engage with the group’s content, and have further collaboration experiences in these applications.

The collaboration assets enabled by Office 365 Groups in each application will vary, based on rollout schedule and

target application experience. For example, Yammer will not include an Outlook inbox for the group, because

messaging will be handled in Yammer—and the reverse is true for Outlook.

Having conversations in Yammer

We encourage employees at Microsoft to use Yammer for open collaboration, feed-like communication, and a more

engaging social experience than has ever been possible through email. Yammer creates connections and facilitates

conversations between your team members and other company colleagues.

Yammer is designed to invite and inspire conversations and can be effectively used to begin a conversation about

your content. Depending on how broad your audience is, you can distribute a SharePoint link in a public or private

group—or even globally. We recommend that you link to files on SharePoint when collaborating within Yammer.

One of the biggest advantages of Yammer, from an IT perspective, is that communities are self-created and

organized.

Having conversations in Outlook 2016

Outlook 2016 is an option when you want your communications to be visible to a specific and targeted audience.

Many teams have established a culture of work that relies on organizational features, participation management, and

reminders available in Outlook.

Collaboration best practices Although there aren’t set rules for how employees should work, we encourage people to use these best practices to

decide how to collaborate with colleagues:

Use One Drive for Business for individual storage.

Use group experiences in Outlook 2016 or Yammer and store team files in their associated SharePoint team sites.

Use Yammer for conversations with broad audiences across the organization.

Conversations in Outlook 2016 are a good choice for individuals and teams that frequently use—and are more

familiar with—communicating through distribution lists and/or email.

Conclusion Being a cloud-first organization is a journey, not a destination. We continue to look at ways to raise employee

awareness and understanding, and drive change in employee behaviors. We want to help people be productive as

cloud collaboration solutions evolve and new ways of working are introduced.

It’s important to understand how collaboration capabilities are used by your team, within your organization. Our

recommendations are based on what might work best for employees and what works best for the organization.

It is very important for us to share best practices and policies with employees. We made minor customizations in the

user interfaces of OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online that include high-level guidelines to remind users

what can be appropriately stored and shared. We also provide information about collaboration options through

internal communications and our internal portal. To augment those communications, we developed a series of

collaboration productivity guides, which are designed to help our employees choose an appropriate solution, and

provide step-by-step guidance to help them do common tasks.

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IT Showcase Article

microsoft.com/itshowcase September 2016

For more information SharePoint at Microsoft

Protecting and managing Microsoft data with SharePoint governance

Monitoring and protecting sensitive data in Office 365

Microsoft IT microsoft.com/itshowcase

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