by Erin Kester, Senior Consultant | May 9, 2024
Microsoft 365 (M365) is a digital environment where employees seamlessly collaborate, communicate, and access their work tools and resources from anywhere via cloud-based technologies. This Cloud Unified Work Experience aims to provide employees with a consistent and seamless digital workspace that fosters collaboration, enhances productivity, and supports flexible work arrangements.
M365 is an ecosystem that allows tons of flexibility for how businesses store and access information. But that can make it a challenge to find the right content. M365 meets this challenge in multiple ways at personal, shared, and organizational levels.
Personal findability: OneDrive in M365
OneDrive has traditionally been a place to create and manage personal work files. Personal cloud storage, if you will. Most people are aware of the Sync service that makes these cloud files visible in your desktop file manager too. But there’s a newer OneDrive experience that will take users beyond simply foldering content. The OneDrive home page in M365 has evolved into a cloud file manager, and it’s pretty great.
Microsoft 365 can feel sprawl-y because your content is stored across numerous Teams, SharePoint sites, and your own OneDrive folders. It’s hard to remember where it all lives and go to the right place to find what you need.
OneDrive’s cloud file manager experience can be a real game-changer for personal file management.
The cool thing about the new OneDrive cloud content manager experience? It gives you a single point of entry in the browser to reach the content from all these sources using a range of unique features:
- Unified findability: Use search, chronological feeds, or dip directly into the file storage from Teams and SharePoint sites through Quick Access, all from one interface. You can even view content based on people who have been working on the content with you, or by Meetings the content is related to.
- Recents feed: This is your cloud content time machine with X-ray vision. View recent activity across all cloud content in a single chronological timeline of content, no matter where the file is in M365.
- Shared with You: Share links in M365 are a great way to collaborate on centralized files, but it can be challenging to find files others have shared with you. Unless you use OneDrive’s “Shared With You” tab to see a chronological, filterable feed of all the files and folders you’ve been given access to by links from emails, chats, direct links, or Teams.
OneDrive’s cloud file manager experience can be a real game-changer for personal file management. Instead of syncing to view your cloud files, you can use OneDrive to work directly with all your files across M365.
Shared Findability: Content & Conversation in Teams
Microsoft Teams is the gold standard for unified conversation and collaboration. The use of dedicated Teams for business units, projects, or business processes allows deeply organized conversation and file management within the Teams interface. Teams search can look across these various types of content, and there’s even a new Find in channel search that helps locate posts.
Fostering findability in Teams can happen at a lot of levels, but it helps to think about this from the top down:
- Team and channels: A Team is a workspace for a specific group of people with a shared purpose. Channels are the themes of work that facilitate that purpose. Be thoughtful about naming to communicate purpose, and keep the number of channels low to align with the major work themes.
- Channel folders vs non-channel folders: Every Teams instance has a SharePoint site underneath that serves as its file room, and each channel has a file folder. It is possible (but not always recommended) to create new folders directly in SharePoint. It is recommended to have a shared understanding of the desired structure and be thoughtful about how your team members will access these files.
- Teams search vs. Find in Channel: Teams search is improving all the time, but if you have membership in a lot of Teams the returned results can be extensive. Use refiners to limit dates, file type, and other parameters. But when you know you’re looking for a Teams channel post, you can now use Find in Channel to look only in the single channel and limit the results to posts. This is a big timesaver when you know what you’re looking for.
With so much collaboration happening in Teams, finding your shared conversations and files can be tough. Being thoughtful about channels and channel folders will help with direct findability, and using Teams search can help you home in on posts and files when you’re not sure where they are. Use Find in Channel when you’re quickly looking for a specific word in channel posts.
Organizational findability: Creating authoritative resources in SharePoint Intranets
Organizations investing in M365 have a great intranet-building platform at their fingertips. Modern SharePoint has a vibrant DIY toolset that makes it easier for business units to create and upkeep engaging published resources. Every intranet achieves its value from the reliability and richness of its content. However, making that content findable can be a challenge.
Modern SharePoint provides a range of features that help support findability and fosters robust and reliable employee information resource:
- Unified search and navigation: Modern SharePoint sites are modular, and IT can bring intranet sites into a related family using the Hub feature. This not only unifies search across all related sites; it also creates a shared navigation panel that is visible in all the sites attached to the Hub. Unique site-level navigation remains available too, so more content can be raised into visibility in navigation.
- Organizational news sources: The SharePoint news feed lets a range of contributors to inform site visitors about activities and announcements. In instances where official news feeds are needed as trusted outlets, Modern SharePoint allows IT to designate specific sites as trusted organizational news sources. This ensures high trust for these outlets, while others can use non-designated news feeds for their own announcements.
- Answers: Where an organization has a set of authoritative information they want available to users, a slate of official answers can be defined in M365, including links to official information sources. For instance, if an employee searches for “employee handbook”, the official answer and link to the HR-published Employee Handbook PDF is presented.
Regardless of whether you want to enhance personal, shared, or organizational findability, Microsoft 365 has options for you. And these examples are all out-of-the-box features that take no additional expenditure or licensing. They do take awareness and sometimes careful planning, and this is where Pico Logic can help. We offer a wide range of Microsoft 365 assistance and thought partnership, from training and support to Teams and SharePoint architecture and solutions.