Graduation Day: Office 365 and the Document Lifecycle

Office 365 gives us a lot of places to store and share documents - OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint being the most prominent. While it's great to have choices, this will typically lead to an important (and frequently asked) question - 'which am I supposed to use?' Of course, the right answer is 'all of them - depending on the document!' While that's the right answer, it tends to leave people even more confused.

So what example can we use to make this all a little less confusing? I like to use the concept that every document has a lifecycle, with graduations to new stages as it grows - just like us. Most documents will start as a rough draft - something you're not quite ready to share yet. OneDrive is perfect for this first stage. Sure, you can share with others from OneDrive, but make this the exception, keeping most files in OneDrive for your own use and convenience.

Ready to share with others, possibly gathering more input and content? Teams is the way to go. Create a Team for the people who need to collaborate, then go to OneDrive, find the document, and help it 'graduate' to the new Team storage area using the 'Move' function ('Copy' is fine too if you prefer to keep the original draft). The Team is where the document will grow from being an individual's idea to becoming part of a larger group effort.

What if the file grows in the Team to become a reference document or record that the larger company population should be able to read? That's when it's time to graduate to a SharePoint intranet site. Setting up your company intranet on SharePoint provides a perfect platform to share to a broad audience, without necessarily letting everyone edit. Once again, you can use the 'Move' (or 'Copy') function to make the graduation process easy (tip: to move files from Teams to other SharePoint sites, choose the 'open in SharePoint' option in the proper Team channel/files tab - you'll have options to move to other non-Team-based SharePoint sites this way).

So the concept is simple - start documents in OneDrive, move to Teams when ready to share, and on to a SharePoint intranet site when ready to publish. Of course, plenty of documents will never graduate out of OneDrive, or move from Teams to SharePoint, but that's fine - each are valid storage areas depending on where the document is in its lifecycle, even if it will remain there permanently.

(p.s. - for the O365 veterans out there - I'll address the OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint storage foundation overlap in another post!)