I have been struggling with finding others that might have at least one Case Study regarding dealing with Teams, Groups, and SharePoint Online all living in the same company. I have proposed a few to clients, but when they ask me “who else has solved this?” I really don’t have any wins. Regarding the use of Groups, and SharePoint Online honestly is the biggest challenge, because of the sprawl that can happen from Groups the value of having a SharePoint Online Intranet or formal Portals becomes more of a hard sell.
So if you have an example, even a MS case study that I can reference….or you want to partner on one please let me know.
Best to describe it using personas.
Me: OneDrive + Delve
You: Teams Sites – Think of using this for collaboration. Small amount of contributors, but large amounts of consumers. Say an ‘HR’ site. May have a few contributors, but the content is being consumed by your entire company. This site is best used not only for collaboration but for the generation and management of content.
Us: Groups – Think of using this for collaboration as well, except you have high number of contributors compared to consumers. For example, internal teams working together on a project. The project information, documents, and assets are only consumed by the group, and not consumed at large. It is meant for velocity, and not so much governance and IA. Groups are built to sprawl so your teams can get started on working collaboratively without having to ask IT to spin up a site and adhere to any IA or Business Rules.
You’ll quickly fine, Governance is hard to obtain with Groups. You lose control over naming of the groups. You have limited functionality pertaining to metadata control and permission control (everyone is a contributor).
Likely, you may have an IT Team sites, where very department under IT uses and creates content. The employees of your company may go here to get IT documents, submit service requests etc… However, your IT department may have sub-teams who are using Groups to do their daily work. You may have a support group, a infrastructure group, etc… Stuff related solely to the department itself, and not consumed by your entire company.
I hope this helps and of course is subjective, if you’d like to discuss more. Let me know!
