There we are again after a serious blogging break. It has been a crazy period with so much nice new Office 365 developments and it is really time to start sharing a situation I encountered with you.

We have to realize that public Teams are really public even for non-members!

Following up on the very nice Storyals concept of explaining a Microsoft Team as a house with rooms, I would love you to understand that a PUBLIC TEAM is like a PUBLIC MEETING PLACE in the village. Everyone in your community HAS FREE ACCESS to the DOCUMENTS in this place and the CONTENT IS EVEN ADVERTISED within the community. And you even do not need to be known to visit here.

Let’s go back to Office 365 terms.

• A user does not need to be an effective member of a Public Team to see the documents shared in this Team
• Public Team Documents show up in applications like Delve and other locations where Office 365 Graphs engine loves to show you suggestions and “this might also be of interest to you”-documents.

To understand this further we have to look a the fundamentals of the file location of a Team and what happens when a Team is set to be public.

Files in Teams are stored in two locations:

• Files shared in private chat are placed in a subfolder within OneDrive of each of the chat participants
• Files shared via Team Channels, and found via the Files Tab, are stored in the default document library, under a subfolder for each channel, on the SharePoint Group site collection where the Office Group and the Team are relying on.

So looking at the SharePoint Document Library permissions this is what we see:

The Site Members group has, next to the “Ruled by Teams membership”-Team Members group, ALSO “Everyone except external users” added!

Meaning that whenever someone within the organization gets a link to a document, from Delve, suggestions feed or via other means, this user can access, READ AND EDIT, the document without even opening Teams or even having the corresponding Team added within Teams (and being a registered Team-member).

This all is not an issue in case you are aware of this and you make a clear choice to create or set a Team as Public.

My recommendation is to start always with Private Teams and ONLY go into PUBLIC mode if the data is really FOR ALL EYES TO SEE.

Inform your users about this and make them well aware of making the right choice to avoid data leakage and embarrassing situations.

Teams are great, just know what you are doing!

Read more on Microsoft’s instruction page: Default SharePoint groups, section on “everyone except external Users”

Be informed 🙂

Someone send me the following ZDNet article “Survey confirms collaboration and the apps that come with it still suck – We’re wasting so much time collaborating and toggling between apps it’s a miracle any work actually gets done.”

The problem with this survey is that the loss due to the self-centered tools like email is not taken into account. The switching between tools, in my opinion, is compensated more than enough by the gain in team collaboration productivity.

It is also not surprising that it is exactly the older generation that cannot keep up and prefers to stay with the email client because the longer you are used to working a certain way the more difficult it is, in general, to change and start doing thing differently. Just human nature.

The strength of Office 365 is exactly what it is all under one roof and you are less and less switching because you are just moving around within 1 environment.

Office 365 apps are getting so integrated with each other that you can go start speaking about the One Office app. What we might now consider as all separate apps of Office 365 to switch between, are actually just different areas of the One Office app, where you do different things for different purposes.

This article fits with a statement put in one of the Collaboris community guest Teams channels: “one or several team members were heavily established in Outlook – meaning: the mail archive was the primary information repository for these members and they had a very large and detailed mail archive with folders, categories, automated rules, and more. For these members, the switch from Outlook email to Teams conversations equaled a loss of control over how they own and manage the information (an email in Outlook is personal – a conversation in Teams is collectively owned and cannot be tagged and archived individually like a mail).”

What we read here is the reason that blocks modernizing, knowledge sharing and enhanced productivity.

This is typical “me” thinking instead of “we”.

With personal inboxes info is not available for lookup by Team members(in case they were not in the loop of the email cycle). Keeping everyone in the loop by email creates a hog of emails back and forth. Also maintaining documents in your attachments as file storage is entirely not where your mail client was meant for.

So how do we break this line of thought and get people to understand the real power of One Office 365 and forget about the switching apps idea?

The what’s in it for US factor!

Another community post stated: “Have any of you introduced Teams into an organization that already uses Yammer & Skype? What experience or reaction did you have from your user base? My organization is not exactly tech-savvy and is only beginning to come to terms with Yammer and Skype ”

I my opinion “coming to terms” should change to “embracing” what only works in case the “What’s in it for us” question can be answered by each user with a positive answer driving the user to want to adopt for the benefit of the entire company towards a more productive, enjoyable and efficient work environment, cost reduction and quality of work inprovement.

Lets embrace the One Office 365 app and start to explore how it can enhance our work!

See also my article Office365 Apps Adoption