Forum Discussion
Office groups, sharepoint online and students
Hi,
I'm not sure if this is a common education issue or just my own insecurities. I work for a large UK University. Our students have been using office 365 for a while, and that means they have some office groups too and thus those groups have sharepoint spaces under /sites in sharepoint online.
We're now thinking about how we might get staff more into office 365. One part of that would be moving intranet materials to sharepoint online. Except the obvious location is /sites.
I'm not sure an extra domain is right (plenty of intranet material is for students too), I'm just a little hesitant about our structured site collections rubbing shoulders with the randomly named student office groups.
I did think about putting all the intranet stuff as subsites of the sharepoint online root, but then everything is one big site collection.
I appreciate sharepoint spaces for groups is relatively new but has anyone else thought about this?
Thanks.
I'm not sure if this is a common education issue or just my own insecurities. I work for a large UK University. Our students have been using office 365 for a while, and that means they have some office groups too and thus those groups have sharepoint spaces under /sites in sharepoint online.
We're now thinking about how we might get staff more into office 365. One part of that would be moving intranet materials to sharepoint online. Except the obvious location is /sites.
I'm not sure an extra domain is right (plenty of intranet material is for students too), I'm just a little hesitant about our structured site collections rubbing shoulders with the randomly named student office groups.
I did think about putting all the intranet stuff as subsites of the sharepoint online root, but then everything is one big site collection.
I appreciate sharepoint spaces for groups is relatively new but has anyone else thought about this?
Thanks.
We are at the beginning of the implementation of a Sharepoint Online based intranet / document management, but our approach is the same as Silvia Cazares wrote: we are going to create site collections for departments and other organizational units, using the 'root site' as a directory for quick access to the various sites.
I don't think that an extra domain would be necessary in your case, yet it might be problematic if someone 'reserved' a name for a group and then you need to create a site collection with the same name: you won't see that (o365 groups) site listed in the Sharepoint Admin Center, but you will get an error message when you try to create it, as both groups and site collection are living in the /sites/ namespace. Administrative management of o365 groups got definitely better in the last months but it still needs to be improved by Microsoft.
Hi Peter Gibbs,
We implemented SharePoint online for some of our business units before groups came into play. We thought about the structure and because of different limitations we also did not want to create all sites/subsites as part of one big site collection.
What we currently do instead is have different site collections per business unit, for example. We have some out for HR, Finance, Student Affairs and sub-sites per teams within those site. The way we aggregate them all is on our SharePoint homepage xxx.sharepoint.com. Here we created an Index of all sites, divided by Academic Divisions, Departments, and Projects. First time users know to come to this site to find the site they are looking for. They are then instructed to "favorite", "follow" their sites so that it shows up on their Promoted sites when clicking on "SharePoint" from the tile.
Also, since we did not previously have a university wide intranet, we have started rolling out SharePoint in a controlled manner for interested groups that either need an intranet or are trying to resolve a business need.
I'm sorry I don't have answers, just saying that I'm also looking at how one would implement a whole school system with Office 365/SharePoint/OneDrive for Business.
I'm coming from the other end - where I'm not very familiar with SharePoint Team sites, but a little more familiar with Groups. That is because when using Microsoft Classroom, groups are created for different classes. Microsoft Classroom is quite new, it is still in Preview. I got involved with Microsoft Classroom because of OneNote Class Notebook and got involved with that due to being an enthusiastic OneNote user. Ms Classroom is essentially a SharePoint implementation. I've always been avoiding SharePoint per se - its hierarchy and navigation never seemed logical to me. Now it seems that these two are merging - that is Groups and Team Sites. So, in a nutshell, I'm quite new to the whole concept of SharePoint.
The question did come up with a colleague of mine - how do we keep educator groups safe in such a mixed environment where there are educator groups and educator+learner groups? Should we have separate domains or what do we do?
Now the whole issue with Office 365 groups, SharePoint Team sites and OneDrive for Business seems to be in flux, needing IT to rethink its approaches of how data is stored/shared/secured. I'm just an educator who happens to be interested in the application of technology in education, since I also teach computer technology. As an early adopter of new technology I need to provide some sort of direction to our institution when it comes to implementing technology.
I'm not sure if there is a good, well-thought-through model available of best practises of how to implement all the new Office 365 features in an interconnected school/university system. Any pointers in this direction would be welcome.
