OneDrive for Business vs Team Sites

This is a question I am seeing more and more. I was actually asked this very question today in the SharePoint Administration for IT Pro course that I’m running at the moment. I gave my standard answer but upon later reflection on that I found what I think is a much better, if not somewhat simpler answer to use. So here goes.

So above you can see a typical OneDrive for Business location.

and now above is a typical Team Site.

I believe the simplest answer to the differences between OneDrive for Business and a Team Site is clear when you look at the contents of the sites.

OneDrive for Business is mainly for storing personal documents while a Team Site is for collaborating on documents AND other things like calendars, contacts, lists, etc that are required by a group (i.e. team) of people.

Of course both OneDrive for Business and Team Sites can do exactly what the other does by virtue of the fact they are both SharePoint sites. However, I think the above description is the best way to understand the distinction at its most basic.

The general idea is that for a document an individual wants to work on privately or with a limited number of people, they should use OneDrive for Business. If however, they need to work on a project that requires multiple people’s input and requires multiple elements like calendar’s, contacts, lists AS WELL as documents, then a Team Site is a better option.

What makes the positioning hard at the moments is that all OneDrive for Business users get 1,000GB or storage while a Team Site on starts with 10GB. I’m sure that will change very soon but for now it doesn’t help the whole concept of ‘collaboration’ that SharePoint is about. However, I understand that OneDrive for Business and like products are a good way for businesses to start dipping their toes in the cloud.

So, if someone asks you about what they should be using OneDrive for Business versus Team Sites hopefully you can use the above definition as way to help them understand.

Easier external sharing comes to Office 365

It is amazing what you find when you start fiddling around in your Office 365 console.

If you login as an administrator and select the option external sharing from the menu on the left you will be greeted by the above screen which contains a number of simply on/off controls for sharing your services in one location.

Where it gets interesting is when you select the external users from the menu across the top.

As you can see from the above screen, now as an administrator I can see all the external (non-Office 365 tenant licensed users) who have received invitations to access any of the SharePoint (including OneDrive for Business) sites.

This means now as an administrator you can not only see every external user but you can also remove them all from a single location!

If you now go to the third menu option sites you can see a list of all your site collections and whether they are sharing externally. You can also enable or disable anonymous guest links here.

I can see in the list of sites that OneDrive for Business (My Sites) that it is configured for Share Invitation as shown.

If you place a check mark for and hit the details link which appears on the right you can quick turn off external access for the whole site as well as not allow anonymous links as shown above.

However, here’s the best option in this external sharing option. If you select calendar from the menu across the top you’ll see that you have controls to share calendars via a public URL! YIPEE! Oh, how I have waited for this feature.

There is simply too much to go into on this new feature in this post. I’ll do another one shortly but for all the information you need for setting up external calendar sharing in Office 365 visit:

Share calendars with external users

The final option allows you to bulk control Lync federation with external contacts as shown above.

Having all the external sharing option in one location for administrators will make life so much easier. Previously having to dig through separate SharePoint sites to manage and control external users and sharing was pain. Having a location for not only all external users but also the ability to centrally manage access will be heaven.

However, by far and away the greatest addition is the ability to now easily share calendars with anyone on the Internet via a public URL is HUGE and now provides parity with many other web based services. Hopefully, that ability will also be available via Outlook if it isn’t already.

I’ll dig more into the public calendaring ability and write that up in another blog post soon.

These changes are GREAT news for Office 365 administrators and provide the functionality many have be asking for. Again, well done Microsoft on bringing these features to the product. All I can say is roll on Office 365.

Add attachment from OneDrive for Business

I’ve just been watching the latest Microsoft Garage series video from Microsoft. This one focused on one of my favourite topics, OneDrive for Business. If you haven’t seen it yet you can watch it here:

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about 9 minutes we see in Outlook Web Access the ability to add an attachment directly from OneDrive for Business as you can see in the screen shot above.
Hold the phone! When are we getting this?
I checked my Office 365 tenant and unfortunately as yet I don’t have it.

If I go into my Outlook Web Access and select New email, Insert and then attachment from the menu that appears, as shown above, I get prompted to select a file from my local machine only.
Clearly, the ability to allow attachments directly from OneDrive for Business is coming (faster, faster please) and that is fantastic news because it is a key element that has been missing and makes so much sense.
Roll on Office 365 updates.

Determining SharePoint Online storage usage

Another really popular question I see is “How much space is my SharePoint site using?”. Here’s how you find out for a complete Site Collection (unfortunately, you can’t easily do just do single sub-site, you need to do the whole Site Collection).

Navigate to the top site in the Site Collection in question as an administrator.

Select the cog in the top right of the window just to the right of your name.

From the menu that appears select Site Settings.

In the Site Settings page locate the Storage Metrics option.

You’ll find it at the bottom right under the Site Collection Administration section.

That will take you to a summary page as shown above. In there you can see this size of things like Document Libraries, Lists, etc but you can also see the size of sub sites.

The listed items are hyperlinked so if I click on the Document Library ‘Documents’ you’ll be shown the storage report for that element as shown above (i.e. all the documents stored inside it).

If you select a sub site you will be shown a storage report for this area.

Thus, it is easy to look at the storage usage for a Site Collection and then start drilling down into specific areas.

You can do this for any SharePoint Online Site Collection you have INCLUDING OneDrive for Business.

New Office 365 top menu bar options

I was poking around in SharePoint Online and came across a number of new top menu bar navigation options as shown above.

How do you get here? You login to your Office 365 console as an administrator and then select the Admin option in the top right. From the menu that appears select SharePoint. Once here select the settings options at the bottom of the menu on the left as shown above.

At the top on the right hand side you will see that you can show or hide the following top menu bar options:

– OneDrive for Business

– Yammer / Newsfeed

– Sites

You’ll find more information about these options at:

SharePoint Help

Thus, your top menu bar for users can now go from:

if you want.

I’ll have to go back and see whether you can hide any of the other menu options in something like the Exchange admin center.

However, this addresses a common complaint I see out there about not being able to customize the top Office 365 menu. Well now you can!

What’s new in Windows Phone 8.1

Here’s a video of what new features to expect with Windows Phone 8.1 coming soon.