Organize your Teams by creating well-structured SharePoint Team sites in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a great tool for facilitating internal communications and ensuring every member of the organization stays up to date. It keeps teams focused and advancing towards the same goals. SharePoint is a file management system that gives secure file storage to the entire organization. SharePoint can be customized and structured to best fit the needs of the business. These are both great products that help facilitate effective collaboration within an organization. The apps are made better when they collaborate themselves. By ensuring SharePoint Team sites are set up efficiently, they can be best used within the Microsoft Teams environment.

Teams in this case serves as the user interface while a SharePoint Team site handles the inner workings, so if a user uploads a file on Teams, it is really being put into a folder on the SharePoint Team site. When a new team in Microsoft Teams is created, a corresponding SharePoint Team site is also made.

Teams can be broken into separate channels to help organize content. Channels in Teams are the segments that make up a team. Channels contain the spaces where work is actually done within the team. By default, a new team will have a General channel  that will be visible in corresponding a SharePoint document library.

New pages and document libraries can also be created in SharePoint and added to Teams.

Rather than working solely within the General channel with labyrinths of folders that grow increasingly deeper, it can be helpful to break up the top-level folders. It can be done in a couple different ways. The channel method keeps all setup work within Teams. The other keeps everything in the default General channel and uses tabs to access additional pages and document libraries.

For the channel method, new channels are added by clicking the options button on the team in Microsoft Teams. This brings up a drop-down menu.

From here, add a channel. When adding a channel, a description can be set to help identify the channel’s purpose. Privacy settings can also be added if it should only be accessed by a certain set of team members. As mentioned previously, after creating the channel, the channel will receive its own folder within the SharePoint team site’s document library.

Each channel also has its own posts section and the ability to add additional tabs. Some teams may prefer to keep work centered within the General channel, so posts are all in the same location. By creating additional document libraries and adding them as channels to the General channel, similar results can be seen.

Start by navigating to the SharePoint team site.

On the Home page of the team site, click new and select Document Library. Input the desired name and click create. Keeping the Show in site navigation box checked is helpful for finding the libraries later.

Now, back in Teams, click the plus icon at the top, on the tab bar. There are a bunch of different options for tabs in Teams, in this case, select Document Library. It will first ask for which team site to pull from, then it will prompt with a list of that team site’s document libraries.

Finally, the tab can be named and created.

Either method can work well depending on what a particular team prefers. When organizing files within either the tabs or the channels, try to minimize the number of folder layers that need to be opened to find files. At the same time, there should be some structure for grouping files into folders, so the team isn’t left to sift through a wall of file names.