Hello, our company uses Microsoft Teams as a place for our 100+ merchandising staff to upload photos and files into a folder system, broken down by client then by state and then by retail location.
ie. Bobs Hammers > Queensland > Store A
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Store B etc.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .> Victoria > Store A
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .> Store B etc.
. . .Daves Pliers > Queensland > Store A
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Store B etc.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .> Victoria > Store A
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .> Store B etc.
etc.
.
Our staff are set up as “guest” users as they simply upload photos of their completed work so that our clients can regularly review standards in each retail outlet.
I’m looking for alternatives to Microsoft Teams as it’s been incredibly buggy (folders becoming invisible to some staff without reason), issues where some of our staff are logged out and then cannot log back in, and the usual “support” from Microsoft thar sends me to several knowledge base pages that aren’t helpful.
I hope the above description isn’t too confusing - I really hope that someone can recommend a simple and effective program as an alternative.
It sounds like SharePoint or OneDrive on the Microsoft 365 tenant would be a better solution than Teams, that isn’t Teams raison d’etre.
Alternatively, something like Dropbox would also seem to offer the type of solution you are looking for.
I would think that the employees being only “guests” on the tenant could be causing problems, also not sure if that doesn’t break the contract conditions for M365… What level of M365 do you have, that might also help in working out what services and apps are already available.
Sharepoint would also be more flexible, allowing the data to be tagged, as opposed to having to make a folder hierarchy. (There are also other web tools/cloud services that offer similar sorts of flexible data visualisation.)
Teams is already using SharePoint or OneDrive internally.
Files that you upload to a channel are stored in your team’s SharePoint folder. These files are available in the Files tab at the top of each channel.
Files that you upload to a one-on-one or group chat are stored in your OneDrive for Business folder and are shared only with the people in that conversation. These are available in the Files tab at the top of a chat.
Correct, but there is a difference between Teams setting up dynamic folders in SharePoint or OneDrive (and it might be the dynamic nature that is the problem, plus guests leaving the files) and actually setting up a proper SharePoint structure to cope with what they want to do.
I think part of the problem is that they are misusing Teams (and having the employees as guests and not users is also very strange). It is like the “old” days of using Excel as a database, you can sort of do that, but it isn’t what it was designed for and you quickly run into problems as things scale up.