When you start to work with Teams, especially if you are looking after Teams within your tenancy, it is important to gain an understanding of what it means to “create a Team”. First of all, creating a Team creates an Office 365 Group. This will pull together a number of pieces of functionality from across O365 to build a comprehensive tool:
- Each team has an object created within Azure Active Directory
- Each Team gets an inbox in Exchange Online
- Each team gets a Modern team site within SharePoint Online
- Each O365 Group gets a Wiki and a OneNote Notebook
- Teams Media Stack – media meetings in teams
It is important to understand that Microsoft Teams, whilst appearing to store all of your data in one place, actually uses lots of different storage areas depending on the types of content.
- Images are stored in Azure Blob storage
- Files which are uploaded to a Team or shared within a Team Chat are stored in SharePoint Online
- Files which are shared within Chat are stored in One Drive for Business
- Voicemails are stored in mailbox in Exchange
- Recordings stored in Media Services which are the surfaced through Microsoft Stream
- Calendars are stored in the mailbox, in Exchange Online, for the user who is logged in
- Contacts are stored within Exchanges Online
- Telemetry is stored and collated within the Microsoft Data Warehouse
There are many moving parts to our Team, however we’re going to concentrate on the aspects within SharePoint Online.
How Teams uses SPO AND ODFB
As we have already discussed, Microsoft Teams uses SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business to store the documents that we choose to share. Behind the scenes, every time we create a new Team, we also create a modern SharePoint Team Site, which makes up part of an O365 Group.
The creation of the Team site is quite intelligent, since if another team site already exists with the same URL, the URL of the new site will automatically append a GUID to ensure it is unique. This team site is also where the OneNote exists, and can then be shared by all of the members of the team.
Users can surface other areas of SharePoint through the Teams user interface by adding tabs. When we add tabs, there are a number of SharePoint components which we can directly link to such as a SharePoint page, a list, news, or a single document.
We also have the added connectivity of the News connector which will automatically post notifications of a news item being published to the chat within Microsoft Teams.
Advantages of Storing files in SPO and ODFB
There are a huge number of advantages for storing our files within Teams, and therefore within SharePoint Online:
- Co-authoring – the ability for multiple people to be working in the same document at the same time. This is available across both the desktop versions of Office as well as the Online versions
- Content becomes subject to data governance and compliance
- Automatic Classification and labelling
- Data loss prevention
- Document retention policies including disposition review and event-based retention
- eDiscovery and legal holds
- Content is subject to additional levels of protection including encryption, customer lockbox, and Azure Information Protection policies.
- Best in class mobile experiences with the Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Apps which are natively available in both iOS and Android. This also expands out to the other Office 365 apps which complement Teams and SharePoint
- Previews for 270+ file types which means that we won’t have to open the file to see the contents of the file. It was announced at SharePoint Conference 2019 that this would be expanding to 320+ file types in the near future
- Files are discoverable throughout Microsoft Search and therefore can be surfaced through Delve. This is assuming that the person searching has permissions to view the file
- OneDrive Sync Client, for either Windows or Mac, allow easy syncing of all of the files for a Team
- Teams will respect any settings which are applied at tenancy level for both SharePoint and OneDrive for Business
Finding Files in Teams
When you load up the Teams application, regardless of whether it is in the desktop version or the browser, you will find the Files tab when you select your channel from the left hand navigation.
When you open the Files tab, you will see all of the files and folders which have been created within the respective channel. Behind the scenes, all of the files are stored within the SharePoint Online site, and we can access the SharePoint site by selecting Open in SharePoint.
In the SharePoint Online site, we can see our files live within the Documents document library, with each channel being created as a new folder at the root of the library.
We have an action bar within SharePoint Online, which allows us to sync to OneDrive as an example, which is not available through Teams. Microsoft are working on improving the integration between Teams and SharePoint.
Any files which are shared within a conversation within a Team, are automatically added to the relevant channel folder within SharePoint. Since Teams manages the storage of documents and provides the user interface to work with our files, the end user does not need to see or know about SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.
Permissions are managed through Microsoft Teams, and effectively manage the membership of the underlying Office 365 Group. You have the ability to go into SharePoint and apply unique permissions through the SharePoint User Interface, however this is not recommended, and should keep it to the default Teams permissions.
Adding Cloud Storage
If we want to work with other storage areas within Teams, we have the ability to add other cloud storage. This storage could be another SharePoint site which we want to access without having to change team or even tenancy, or it could be that we want to use another provider such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
It is possible for an administrator to configure which providers can be added as cloud storage, as the organization may not want to allow their users to access any non-Microsoft storage accounts.
Creating a Team from Scratch
To create a team, we first of all need to “Join or Create a Team”, and then selecting Create a Team. I have the option to build a team from scratch or from an existing team.
I can also then select the permissions to determine whether I want it to be private, org wide or public. I will then name the team, and apply a classification if I have them configured within my tenancy.
The final step is to add any members to the team and choose their role, either a member or an owner.
Once all of that has been done, my new team will appear in my teams list on the left hand side. By default I will have my General channel which contains a conversations, files and a wiki tab. I also immediately have the ability to add Cloud storage.
So for example, if I am working on another project which has documentation which I need to make accessible here, I can select SharePoint as the cloud storage to add, and then select the relevant team that holds the content, or alternatively I can supply the URL of a SharePoint site. This will then prompt me to select the relevant library.
This doesn’t get added as a tab, however, the target document library is actually created as a link within File tab, which when clicked will navigate me to the content of the target library. So I now have access to all of the files and folders that had been created on the other site.
I can create a new channel by clicking on the ellipsis (…) against the Team and selecting New Channel. This will automatically create the new folder within the document library to store my files. If we go and look at the site however, by using the Open in SharePoint link, I will be navigated to the document library. By clicking Home on the left navigation, I will be able to view my SharePoint home page.
Notice that we have an Office 365 Group created, this is indicated by the presence of Conversations on the left hand side, and that we have a modern home page with the default web parts in place. If I click on Documents, I will see the folder structure which has been created by the functionality within Teams.
Teamify a Modern Group Site
Teamify is a new term which allows us to create a team from a modern SharePoint Teams site. If a SharePoint team site does not have a Team associated with it, SharePoint will display a message in the bottom left of the screen which will allow you generate the Team.
There is a known bug, however, where the Create a Team banner will still appear even though a site is already linked to a Team.
It is not uncommon for a requirement to hide these banners, and it is possible through PowerShell. You will first of all need to install the SharePoint PnP PowerShell Online commandlets and connect to your tenancy.
$sSPOTenant = https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com
$sSPOSite = https://tenance.sharepoint.com/sites/ModernTeam
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $sSPOTenant -SPOManagementShell
$SPOSite = Get-PnPTenantSite -Detailed -Url $sSPOSite
If ($SPOSite.DenyAddAndCustomizePages -ne ‘Disabled’) {
$SPOSite.DenyAddAndCusomizePages = ‘Disabled’
$SPOSite.Update()
$SPOSite.Context.ExecuteQuery()
}
Set-PnPPropertyBagValue -Key ‘TeamifyHidden’ -Value ‘True’
This script needs to be run on a site-by-site basis.
I can also Teamify a Classic SharePoint Online site, however first of all I need to Groupify the site to convert it to an Office 365 Group. Before you do this, you should consider using the SharePoint Modernization Scanner to verify if your classic sites will convert to a Group. More information on the Modernization Scanner can be found here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/transform/modernize-scanner
Once you are happy that you can Groupify you Classic team site, you can select Connect to new Office 365 group which is available from the setting cog in the top right corner of the screen.
When you select this link, you will be asked to provide the basic detail about the group such as the Group Name, which will create the email address, and any classification data which you may have configured.
As part of the process of creating the group, you will also specify the permissions for the group i.e. selecting who the owners and members are. The process of Groupify will still honour the permissions which were previously created for the Owners, Members and Visitors group. The output of this process is the converted site which now displays in the modern experience, with the default modern home page.
The Create Team banner is now displayed in the bottom left of the screen, so I can now complete the process of moving from a Classic team site to have a modern site with an associated Team.
Managing Modern Team Sites
If you want to manage your team sites, you need to do this through the Modern SharePoint Admin Center. Modern sites are hidden if you try to use the Classic Admin Center, therefore you will need to switch by using the link in the top right corner of the admin center.
Through the admin center, I can modify the storage settings as well as change the owners of the site.
Default Integration between Teams and SharePoint
We have already looked at the SharePoint site which has been created behind the scenes of Microsoft Teams, so now we will look at how we can surface SharePoint through the Teams Interface to really show that they are the perfect couple.
Tabs
Within the Tabs we have the ability to add a SharePoint document library as a tab by using the Document Library tab, we can add a SharePoint Page using the SharePoint tab, and we can any other type of content by using the website tab.
SharePoint Library
When we add a SharePoint Document Library as a tab, we effectively have the same experience as if we were browsing user Files. We don’t see the actions bar or any customizations which may have been applied to the list. This, however, is going to change in the near future, where we will see a much richer interface between SharePoint and Teams. These updates will also overcome the existing list view threshold when looking at large numbers of files.
SharePoint Tab
The SharePoint Tab will allow us to view a SharePoint page within Microsoft Teams, but also a means to add a list. When we view a page, we can see all of the content, but the “chrome”, the site header, left navigation, and hub navigation if applicable, are all stripped away. There are sometimes issues with the page responsiveness, i.e. the dynamic width, where sometimes it will show you the mobile view rather than the intended page layout. This is purely related to the reduced real estate that Teams has to display the page, unless the expand window button is clicked.
The List rendering user experience, within Teams, has most of the same functionality as SharePoint Online, where it will display any column formatting, interaction with views, however the action bar contains only a subset of the options which are available within SharePoint Online.
Web Sites Tab
We also have the website tab which will allow us to add in any kind of page, not just SharePoint within tabs.
PowerApps
PowerApps tabs allow us to display PowerApps which have been published within our tenancy. With these apps we can work with apps which interact with our SharePoint site, or with data stored within the Common Data Service.
OneNote
We can display the OneNote which has been created within the Office 365 Group, which gives us that element of SharePoint integration. We can create as many new Notebooks as we like or we can add a link to an existing Notebook. Security settings applied within OneNote automatically apply to notes within Teams.
Wiki
Instead of using OneNote we can use the Wiki tab which is another area where you can take notes. By default you will automatically have a wiki tab created which is very simple in terms of creating content. It is a rich text editor which allows you to create different wiki sections.
All wiki pages are created within the wiki page library within SharePoint Online, and behaves in the same way as the document library, where the pages for each channel are stored within the relevant folder. The Teams Wiki Data library does not appear on the left-hand navigation, you will need to access that by going to Site Contents.
Connectors
There is a built in connector, the SharePoint News Connector, which can be configured to automatically post notifications about news posts from the SharePoint site to a Teams channel. This will promote discussion around a news post. Being a built-in connector, this can be configured through the Teams interface in just a few clicks.
Alternatively, custom connectors can be created which will subscribe to a SharePoint Online webhook which can then post to Teams based on the message that has been returned.
Summary
In summary, SharePoint Online is one of the key pieces of Microsoft Teams. The SharePoint site is automatically created when a Team, or Office 365 Group is created. These sites are automatically created as modern sites and provides the storage and document management features required by Teams.
SharePoint Online can be integrated into Teams in an umber of ways for example by using out of the box Tabs, Connectors or be development custom integration components.
The SharePoint Online sites linked to Teams will not appear in the classic SharePoint Admin Center, therefore if you need to administer them, you will need to go to the Modern SharePoint Admin Center.