The clock is ticking. John is about to report to the C-Suite in five minutes, and he can’t find the report he spent hours creating. John is frantically searching through SharePoint to no avail. Now he is looking in Teams channels. Nope. John may have a thoroughly-researched report. It is designed well and will blow away management. But. He can’t find it!

Learning some of the basics about how Microsoft platforms were built can save your next presentation!

What’s the deal with OneDrive?

OneDrive is all about you. It is a step above saving a document on your hard drive because it is on the cloud and you can access it anywhere, but only YOU can access it anywhere. You can choose to share documents or folders from your OneDrive if you want to share your work with others.

What’s the deal with SharePoint?

SharePoint is a shared platform (aptly named) that was built to be a space (or point!) to share and collaborate on documents. The document's containers are called sites here, and creating them requires intervention from the IT department.

Your company probably likes SharePoint because it allows you to set organization-wide rules and make life easier for the compliance and IT teams.

Now, John realized that he shared his report in Teams. Shouldn’t it be in SharePoint if he shared it in Teams? Well. It depends.

What’s the deal with documents in Teams Channels?

The Teams platform was created as a space for people to collaborate by chatting via text or video. It’s that simple. In order to simplify things for users, when a document is added in a Teams channel, it is automatically added to SharePoint. Each team is actually a SharePoint site collection, and documents you save to a Teams channel can be found in a folder (named after the channel) under the Documents library within that site. That may not have seemed to make your life easier in the past, but now that you know this valuable lifehack, show off your new agility with your colleagues. Try it out, pretty nifty right?

What’s the deal with documents in Teams Chat?

Chats within Teams are spaces for more intimate conversations. You may have individual chats in addition to group chats. You might think that if you share a document in a chat that the file will end up in SharePoint just like it did when you uploaded a file in your Teams channel. You would be wrong!!! If you share a document in a chat, it is only saved in YOUR OneDrive, BUT anyone in that chat will have access to the doc in your OneDrive.

Now John realizes that because he shared his file in a chat and not in a Teams’ channel, it can only be accessed in chat or OneDrive. John takes a breath. Opens the file. Makes a power pose and walks confidently into the meeting with his file in hand.

If you are like John, struggling to find documents in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive, simply use harmon.ie to find everything in one place.