Welcome to this Medical Education Technology Instructional. In this piece we will examine file storage, in particular the best practices when storing documents for yourself or for your team. An understanding of the differences between OneDrive and the SharePoint library in Microsoft Teams is helpful.

This instructional will discuss use of three related programs: OneDrive, SharePoint library, and Teams. You can find additional documentation for each program at the links below:
- OneDrive
- SharePoint
- Microsoft Teams

We're sure you are familiar with OneDrive, a document storage service which provides 120 GB of cloud storage to each staff member. Your OneDrive storage is available on the desktop in File Explorer, on the web at onedrive.live.com, or on your mobile device via the OneDrive app.

Best Practice: Utilizing OneDrive.

OneDrive is best used to access and edit your personal work-related documents across different devices. As such, OneDrive also functions as a cloud backup for your files in the event of local storage failure. Though files can be shared individually, this is not recommended with documents concerning your team or work group.
What OneDrive is NOT is a hub for collaboration with your team members, nor is it practical for distributing files to your team or work group on a permanent basis.

Compare this to the SharePoint library, a group file storage service integrated with Microsoft Teams, which you can think of as the organization's version of OneDrive. The SharePoint library is best used to distribute documents to your team. When you upload to the SharePoint library, the file becomes a shared resource to be viewed, edited by, or downloaded anyone on the team.

The SharePoint library can be accessed on the web through Office365 or natively through the files in your Teams group.

Best Practice - Creating Folders in the SharePoint library

A new folder within the SharePoint library is automatically created for each new Teams channel. This provides each channel of communication with a dedicated store of information.

For example, consider the Team GRP-EdTech whose Microsoft Teams group has three channels: General, Chat and Structure. Within the SharePoint library by default there will exist a file directory titled "EdTech" with subsequent folders titled "General", "Chat", and "Structure".

When a new channel titled "Events" is created within the Teams group, a new folder of the same title "Events" is added to the directory in the SharePoint library.

New SharePoint folders can also be created manually within the SharePoint library without creating a corresponding channel in Teams. These new folders will be accessible in both the Teams application and the SharePoint library.
In this example we have added a new folder titled "Media" to the library without creating a new channel.

In both the Teams interface and the SharePoint library, the database will be navigable both by documents with a corresponding channel and by documents created independently.

Congratulations! You now know the differences between OneDrive and the SharePoint library, some tips regarding when to use each, and logic behind the SharePoint library.

For tech help, please reach out to the Medical Education Technology team at imeded@uci.edu. Thank you!