SHAREPOINT or TEAMS – What is the Right Place for Document Collaboration? [Webinar]

Hello, welcome. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, the Great Debate, SharePoint or Teams. What is the right place for document collaboration?

I'd like to introduce today's speaker, Yaacov Cohen, harmon.ie's illustrious CEO. As the founder and CEO of harmon.ie, Yaacov Cohen is a driving force for humanizing technology. He believes technology should work for people and he is using his prominent stance in the industry to advance collaboration and better tech interfaces to advance human interactions both in and out of the workplace. Yaacov is a popular speaker at industry events. He's been featured in the business press including the Wall Street Journal and Forbes—you might have heard of them. Yaacov, the floor is all yours. Take it away.

So let's try to solve this problem first with Teams, then with SharePoint, and maybe we'll find a way to get the best of both worlds and take the best of both platforms to deliver the best possible solution to our end users.

Okay, so if we talk about Teams, it's actually pretty simple. What you can do, and I'm sure you have done it, you can define the Microsoft Teams per sales teams. So for example, you have three teams. So you define a North America sales team, an EMEA sales team, and an Asia-Pacific sales team. Every one of these teams will have rights on all the document shared within the channel of these teams and they won’t have rights and access to the other teams. So the second thing we can do is define a channel for every one of our accounts and that's a good start to collaborate.

So let's take a look. I go to Teams and I have defined in teams with Maya from IT  my Ravenwood Sales Team, and I have one account or one channel per account, and I can go here to my account, my key account, and let's say I've worked on some proposal or some document, I want to get some feedback from my team. So I'm going to just come here, actually I will open the discussion and I will come to Teams and simply drag and drop it.

Okay, so here what I can see very quickly is I drop this in the post tab so I can easily get some input from my team and that's it. It's being posted. And now we are going to be able to work together on any of these documents because we have the files tab. And yes, the files tab is a SharePoint document library and the overall, every time you create a Team, you are getting its side collection being created and now we can work together from here. We can open this document. Actually, I want to open this document not within Teams, but I want to open this document either in a browser or even better in the native app. So that's how you can collaborate and obviously you get a nice integration between chat and file collaboration, document collaboration. So let's see. Now what I only add to this scenario, pretty simple scenario, nothing really new, but we are going to take a look at how this works for harmon.ie.

So today we have a lot of folks on the line, some which are already harmon.ie customers, but we have also a lot of newcomers. We have the majority of audiences from IT, but we have also business analysts, a product manager, knowledge management. So here with Harmon.ie we'll give them a quick introduction of harmon.ie. Basically with harmon.ie, we get an Outlook plugin, which is making it easy for me and for every business user to access the Microsoft Cloud services, the Microsoft 365 services. So I have all my SharePoint sites here, all my Teams, and all in my OneDrive, which are Shared by Me documents. So I can go to this Ravenwood Sales Team that we just saw before and I'm getting a view of all the channels which are available there, the exact same list. And all this is happening dynamically.

There's no need to configure anything. Harmon.ie is learning, during upload time, the configuration of your Teams infrastructure and your SharePoint infrastructure. And what I can do with harmon.ie, again, I can add a document very easily from my desktop, I can do bulk operations. What's even more interesting is that because I'm integrated in email, I can open my harmon.ie bar from a received email and I can simply drag and drop an attachment to the channel, to the same channel. So very easy integration with all my channels. And if I double click this proposal to collaborate on it, actually this time it opens up directly in Word and the document stays on SharePoint. So I can do comments and mention people and I have a really easy way to collaborate with my team. When it's embedded within Team, it's not that easy. So that's the first option to really go on the easy way without much of IT. And what I would like to ask you now is maybe a poll question to get your opinion.

Sharon: Thank you so much, everyone. We would like you to take a moment and weigh in on this poll, what are the benefits of document collaboration in Microsoft Teams? And you can select as many check boxes as they apply: integrated chat and file collaboration, simple structure, no dependency on IT to set up and maintain, simple security model. And if there's something else that you could think of, you can click other and/or just write us in the chat. We're going to take a minute or so to let everyone take their time and respond to the poll and then we will share the results.

And here we go, here are the results. With integrated chat and file collaboration, we come out at 92%, 48% of you mentioned simple structure, no dependency on IT to set up and maintain at 57%. Simple security model at 38%. And we have some others, and I'll share those shortly with you as we go on. But thank you for participating and let's find out what else you have to say, Yaacov.

We are all in agreement, I think, for the key benefits. It would be interesting also to hear about the other opinions and the one, what are so important to notice is a limitation of this solution. First, this is limited to 200 accounts, and even with 20 accounts you are struggling because you are going to get even channels, Teams will add the less huge channels, and your end user will have difficulty to find the right channels. So this works pretty well up to 20 accounts, but then it becomes a little more challenging. Also the simple structure and the intuitive taxonomy of leveraging the team structure and the channel structure to basically put some order and place information in the different channels is also relatively naive and limited because for example if we want to separate to enable reuse of content, you want to be able to have document type, and with presentation proposals, solutions, and to be able to pick from another account a solution as a foundation for your own solution. So here you could do it if you define under the file document library, you start defining sub folders and you have a folder of a presentation or folder of a proposal. But then you’re losing the integral chat and file collaboration because when you just drop it to the chat, it's going to go to the top level files.

So that's kind of the other thing, sharing to somebody outside the team is challenging. If you want to reduce a sub team to talk about certain subjects, you can use private channels. So definitely we see, well, some limitation.

So let's take a look now how we can do that with SharePoint and using SharePoint for account teams collaboration. So what we can do here is to use site collection and to define one site collection, Dell Sales Team. So we have North America site collection, EMEA, and an APAC site collection. And there what we can do, we can leverage metadata and we can have the account name as the metadata and the document type as another metadata.

So this way we have a lot more options. So let's take a look at how it looks like. So let's go to SharePoint. So I'm going to go back to harmon.ie and I will go to all locations and this time I will go to my SharePoint location and its Ravenwood accounts. Actually I can also see, I'm going to see in the browser. So let's do it, open in browser, and here it is. So this is my Ravenwood Sales Team, here’s the account library, accounts library. And as you can see, I have account name and document type. I can easily drag, drop some content to the browser, and boom, copied.

It's been copied, yeah, it's coming, it is. And actually I need to pay attention. I may miss it. The file is missing required information, I need to put the account name and I need to put the document type. Oops. So I can pick up select tab, take presentation, apply, that's it. So now people can see these documents and have an ability to basically tag these documents or to give them the right metadata. If we take a look at the same account library in harmon.ie, so I have all these documents so it's hard to see, but what I have here, I define a view and I can take a look by accounts. So I have a really nice view here when I can see all the team accounts and I can easily have a per account view. So the interesting thing’s also again with harmon.ie is I can integrate with the email.

So I can very easily update this quote. Let's say it's a new version of an existing document. I'm going to post it and that's it. I don't even need to give the metadata because it's a new version of an existing document. So these give me the ability to very easily capture content. I can do bulk corporation. If I have document on my desktop and I want to save them, I can pick up three documents, drag and drop them to my Outlook window.

I can actually hover on the account name, and it will automatically upload all the documents, automatically set up because I hover, it will set up to with the right account names. The last thing I'm going to do, but it's going to be a one type one time typing for all the document with the better proportion. That's it. I saved a lot of time here because I had six fields, two fields per document, and I was able to hover on the account name, and this way harmon.ie was smart enough to apply that account name on all the three documents.

So then I had to only specify the document type for all three documents. So I had only one property fielding other than six. So that's nice time. So if I want to share as an email, I can also very easily. The sidebar is in every document and I'm sending links rather than sending attachment. If I press the “I” key, I will because I know maybe somebody doesn't have access and I'm sending that outside, I can press the “I” key and that's it. I have an attachment. So pretty easy to access the Microsoft Cloud, pretty easy to capture and classify content. I can also take an email and I can go ahead and file emails per account.

Okay, let's say, so here I'm able to save email on SharePoint and what I get is I have the ability to get automatic mapping of the email field by SharePoint columns. So I can see my, all the email I have saved, I can see the sender, attachment, date, what has been sent to, and I see the metadata. So that's very special that I can actually apply metadata to emails. And I have automatic mapping of the email fields to SharePoint columns. So these enable me to keep business critical emails and to not to let them stay in my inbox. And if when you have business user leaving your company, the emails are lost. The only way to really keep business critical emails to the benefit of the organization is to make it easy for this end user, as we talked about. Making the right thing to do for the individuals, the easy thing to do, and this email is now being captured for the benefit of the organization. So that's one of the most used features of harmon.ie, the ability to upload and apply metadata to emails.

The other thing which I wanted to mention with harmon.ie is the ability to search across. Across multiple applications, across SharePoint and OneDrive and Teams. So here for example, I can also, I see content from all these applications in one search. I don't need to go to every app and I can select an app and I can see content which reside on the team channels. And this way I can discover a team which I didn't know about. I have rights, so I can just open containing location and now I have access to the files document label.

So that's about how harmon.ie is also providing within the comfort zone of the business user an ability to access all the Microsoft 365 services within Outlook, within the comfort zone of the business users.

I'm going to share with you our findings from your European colleagues about what they found being the benefits of this approach. So obviously Rich Taxonomy was the number one preferred feature of this approach, which is the facilitating reuse of content.

And this is a very scalable solution. I can have thousands of documents and I can have hundreds of accounts. I'm able to have a very scalable solution for a lot of content and a lot of accounts. Also with SharePoint, you can apply a retention label, you can define workflows, and I've automated business processes. So let's say when I file an email on SharePoint, this can trigger some retention level - for long I can keep this email. But let's not forget the other side of the equation, which is for the individual user: so far we don't have an integrated chat, and we are very dependent of IT. With Teams also you need some help of IT in some governance, you can't let just every business user to create their own teams. But there is actually more flexibility to decide what you want to let end users do versus what you want to control. With SharePoint, you don't have much flexibility. You are going to need as IT people, you're going to need to support these end users to set up the metadata. You're going to need the business team to come up with the right taxonomy, but at the end you're getting a more scalable solution.

Q: Does this integrate with Outlook Online?

A: Yes, so definitely. So very, very interesting question is that today we have what I will call a prototype of harmon.ie working within Outlook Web, but we are coming with a new harmon.ie 365 cloud edition that will come early next year. We will have a preview soon to share with you in one of these webinars and we will provide a harmon.ie cloud edition which provides all the functionality that you have seen today within all Outlook. So Outlook Web, the upcoming Outlook, Outlook on Mac, and even mobile.

Q: Can harmon.ie group visa sales emails, not just files, together in one central location for the sales team?

A: Yes. So yeah, very good point. You can do a view, and we didn't define it that way. You can do a view which is going to be email by account and not only we have the mapping of email fields to show up on columns, but they're going to appear actually by account. We internally use it that way. So yes.

Q: Since the container for Teams is SharePoint, how would the user know the difference?

A: So the user, actually, they don't really know that the files tab is SharePoint and the default and the way people are using this files tab is without metadata. In theory, you could apply metadata to files, but that doesn't really feed the user model of Teams because teams are being created by business users without IT knowledge most of the time. So although without some organization which are going that way, that they, that's interesting to see how this would evolve. So at the end, you need to think about the user experience to your users and the backend system is more important for the organization.

Q: If you share the link with someone that is not in the permissions of the site library, will the system share it as read only?

A: Yeah, so harmon.ie doesn't introduce any security model, but it's totally embracing the SharePoint and Team security model. Meaning if you don't have access to a document library, you won't be able to access it from harmon.ie. But I think what I've been asked here is if you share, so you can share a document to a specific individual. This will give this individual rights, and if you drag and drop a link into an email and automatically, it means harmon.ie will, as you said, yes, harmon.ie will add rights to this individual. It has been shared for this individual and it's going to be based on the default of what you set up on this library. The defaults is read. Read only.

Q: Is the harmon.ie interface only available in Outlook? They have a lot of plugins, so they're just wondering how else you can interact with harmon.ie.

A: Yes, so harmon.ie is available as an Outlook plugin. It's available as an Outlook web plugin. We have also Office plugins, but the main, and then we are going to come up with this Outlook cloud edition, which is going to be an upgraded version working with all Outlooks, including Outlook Web.