For most of my career, I’ve worked primarily with Microsoft products. And for the last three years, I’ve worked in a consulting, services and education organisation that’s entirely focused on extracting value for our customers from their investments in Microsoft technology (often via an Enterprise Agreement, or similar). So, living in my Microsoft-focused bubble, it’s easy to forget that there are organisations out there for who deploying Microsoft products is not the first choice. And I’ve found myself in a few online conversations where people are perplexed about Office 365 and which tool to use when.

I used to use the Office 365 Wheel from OnPoint solutions until I discovered Matt Wade’s “Periodic Table of Office 365”, which attempts to describe Office 365’s “ecosystem of applications in the cloud” in infographic format:

But, as I said, I’ve also been in a few discussions recently where I’ve tried to help others (often those who are familiar with Google’s tools) to understand where SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams fit in – i.e. which is used in what scenario?

A few weeks ago, I found myself trying to do that on the WB-40 Podcast WhatsApp group, where one member had asked for help with the various “file” constructs and another had replied that “not even Microsoft” knew that. Challenge accepted.

So, in short form for social media, I replied to the effect that:

1. Teams is unfinished (IMHO) but built on top of Office 365 Groups (and very closely linked to SharePoint).
2. SharePoint can be used for many things including a repository for team-based information – regardless of what those teams are (projects, hierarchy, function).
3. OneDrive is a personal document store.

In effect OneDrive can be used to replace “home drives” and SharePoint to provide wider collaboration features/capabilities when a document moves from being “something I’m working on” to “something I’m ready to collaborate on”. Teams layers over that to provide chat-based workspace and more.

And then I added a caveat to say that all of the above is the way we work and many others do but there is not one single approach that fits all. And don’t even get me started with Yammer…

Still struggling with this… feels like a fudge until something is finally done with the @MicrosoftTeams/@Yammer/@Outlook siloes… pic.twitter.com/ywtFGOWcpN

— Mark Wilson ???? (@markwilsonit) June 13, 2018

The key point for me is that organisations really should have an information management strategy and associated architecture, regardless of the technology choices made.

And, just in case it helps, this is how one UK Government department approaches things (I would credit my source, but don’t want to get anyone into trouble):

They split up documents into a lifecycle:

1. Documents start life with a user, so can go in OneDrive.
   • As the user collaborates with colleagues those colleagues can gain shared access to the document in OneDrive.
   • They proposed the use of 2-year deletion policies on all OneDrive for Business files [I would question why… storage is not an issue with Enterprise versions of Office 365, and arbitrary time-based deletion is problematic when you go back to a document for a reference and find it’s gone…].
2. If the original document leads to a scoped piece of work then the Documents are moved to an Office 365 Group, as that neatly fits in with a number of resources that are common to collaboration: Planner, Calendar, File Storage (SharePoint), etc. And O365 Groups underpin Teams.
   • However, this type of data is time limited.
   • They proposed the use of 2-year deletion policies on all O365 Groups [again, why?].
3. If a document became part of organisational policy/guidance, etc. then the proposal was to create permanent SharePoint sites for document management or potentially to move such documents to the organisation’s Intranet service [which could be running on SharePoint Online], or other relevant location.

So, you can see the lifecycle properties:

1. User (limited need to know).
2. Group (wider need to know).
3. Organisation (everyone can know).

This plan has the potential to allow the organisation to manage data in a better way and minimise the costs of the additional storage required for SharePoint. But, core to that is turning the idea that OneDrive for Business is personal use on its head. It’s a valid place to store business data, but users should manage the lifecycle of data better. And this needs to be plain for the user to understand so they can spend the minimum amount of time managing the data.

[i.e. they don’t like the idea that OneDrive for Business is a personal data store – it’s a data store provided to users as part of their job and they don’t like “personal” being part of that definition. My 4pth is that the limits of “personal” and “work” are increasingly eroded, but I can see that organisations have legal and regulatory concerns about the data held in systems that they manage.]

So, which Office 365 tool to use? There is no “one size fits all” but some of the above may help when you’re defining a strategy/architecture for managing that information…