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About this lesson
Sharing files is an important part of many team activities. This lesson covers how to add personal file stores to teams and the difference between files hosted in Teams and other services.
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Quick reference
Adding Cloud Storage to Teams
Extend file content for your personal files as well as shared content In Teams by adding cloud storage.
When to use
Teams can be the place where you have access to all your Team files, as well as personal cloud storage accounts. When you have services like DropBox of Google Drive for your business or personal use, you can add them to Teams.
Instructions
Files posted to a Teams channel are stored behind the scenes in SharePoint online. You can view the files in SharePoint by selecting a channel, clicking on the Files tab at the top of the screen and then clicking Open in SharePoint. Note that in SharePoint, you have a little more flexibility in how you share a file than is offered in Teams.
The Files icon on the left menu shows your "personal" files, meaning, files in Teams and Onedrive that you can access. You can add other cloud file storage services to this list so you can work with all your files in one place. Simply click on Add cloud Storage, select the service and enter your credentials. Note that the files shown here are not stored in Teams and as result, you cannot Share them from Teams.
You can also add cloud file storage to a Teams channel. If you do so, be sure the content you share is available to the people on the Team. Adding a personal file store in the Channel will generally lead to access issues. You can safely add business accounts where your company has provided access to for the organization to a cloud file storage service, or you can add a SharePoint Online document library that everyone can access since it is part of Office or Microsoft 365.
Hints & tips
- Add your personal file storage accounts to your Teams application to bring all your files into one place.
- Remember that files from your personal storage account services cannot be Shared directly from Teams.
- The Files icon on the left sidebar, under Teams, shows all the files across all Teams, you can access.
- 00:04 When you're working with files, you have to store them somewhere and
- 00:07 nothing is more convenient than storing them on your local computer.
- 00:11 However, if you do, you miss out on the benefits of storing files in the Cloud.
- 00:16 Those include accessing your files from any device or
- 00:19 when you're traveling or you're on your phone.
- 00:21 You won't have access to the files if they're only on your PC, and
- 00:24 what have you lose your PC or if you get an upgrade?
- 00:28 You'll have to restore all those files from a backup.
- 00:31 The most common way of sharing local files is to send them as attachments.
- 00:34 And this can lead to versioning issues, a problem you really want to avoid.
- 00:39 And if you're working with large files, those can be hard to share.
- 00:44 Microsoft 365 and
- 00:46 Office 365 come with a personal Cloud storage service called OneDrive.
- 00:52 When you put files on OneDrive, they are private by default.
- 00:54 Now, it's easy to share them with others, but
- 00:57 you have to go through an extra step to that.
- 01:00 And there's a synchronization service that makes it easy for
- 01:03 you to work on your personal files locally.
- 01:05 And they are automatically synchronized into OneDrive, and
- 01:08 that way you get the best of both words.
- 01:10 Teams which is also built into Microsoft and
- 01:14 Office 365, you can think of as shared Cloud Storage.
- 01:18 Everything you put on Teams is shared with your team by default.
- 01:21 You don't have to go through any extra steps to share files.
- 01:25 Teams has the same synchronization capabilities as OneDrive so
- 01:29 you can work locally and share to your team.
- 01:32 It's built on SharePoint Online, which is a service we haven't talked about much in
- 01:36 this class, because it's behind the scenes.
- 01:39 Even so, when you share a file on Teams, it's actually stored on SharePoint Online.
- 01:44 You don't generally need to be concerned about that.
- 01:46 But it does come up when we're talking about files.
- 01:49 One of the best things about teams is the extensibility.
- 01:52 It's easy to add cloud-based file storage to Teams.
- 01:56 This lets you add other services that are familiar to you.
- 01:59 So you have learning curve and provides flexibility,
- 02:02 lets you adapt to the way that you already work.
- 02:06 Services like Dropbox, Box, Citrix, and
- 02:09 Google Drive can easily be added directly into Teams.
- 02:12 Let me show you how that works.
- 02:14 In other lessons, we talked about opening and uploading files, but
- 02:18 let's go a little deeper.
- 02:19 Here you can see you can also open in SharePoint.
- 02:23 Now, normally you wouldn't need to do this but
- 02:25 let's just take a look at what happens.
- 02:27 When you do, this opens up the underlying file storage system for Teams,
- 02:32 which is SharePoint Online.
- 02:34 You can see these are the exact same files.
- 02:37 And it is definitely possible to use this URL to put your files into and
- 02:43 those files will then show up in Teams.
- 02:45 However, why bother when you can just post them directly into Teams?
- 02:50 Also, notice on the left there is a Files tab.
- 02:53 And if you click on this tab,
- 02:55 you'll see that your personal file storage is also listed here under OneDrive.
- 03:00 So Megan can click on OneDrive and access all the files that she has stored there.
- 03:06 And here she can copy or download or open it in the OneDrive interface,
- 03:12 as we're looking at the files that are stored in OneDrive.
- 03:15 But we're using it in the Teams' interface.
- 03:17 So this is basically just a front-in.
- 03:20 You can think of it like that.
- 03:21 These files are actually stored on OneDrive.
- 03:24 Let's click on Open in OneDrive and view them in the OneDrive interface.
- 03:30 When we click on Open in OneDrive, we'll see the files as they exist in OneDrive.
- 03:35 This is where the files actually live.
- 03:38 And as a result, you'll see that the files behave a little differently depending on
- 03:41 where you use them.
- 03:43 The Teams' listing is just pointing to
- 03:46 where the files actually reside in OneDrive.
- 03:49 So there is a difference in the way they behave.
- 03:52 In the OneDrive interface, if I click on Employee Travel, for example.
- 03:57 And then I select all the things I can do, I have a lot of choices including share,
- 04:02 for example.
- 04:03 However, if I try to do the same action from Teams'
- 04:08 interface of the OneDrive files, I'll find I have fewer choices.
- 04:12 And share is not an option.
- 04:14 And that's because the sharing permissions have to be enabled
- 04:19 where the file resides, which is in OneDrive.
- 04:22 This is provided as a convenience.
- 04:24 So in this case Megan only needs to go to one place to access all of her files.
- 04:29 Her personal files are here, her team's files are here, and then also
- 04:34 she can find the files for individual channels and their listings as well.
- 04:39 Any files here are shared with the entire team's.
- 04:43 Whereas files that are listed here are just shared with her by default,
- 04:48 as you can see, although some of these have been already shared out.
- 04:52 And they'll be listed as shared in the Sharing column.
- 04:55 In many cases, people have file storage services that they'd like to use
- 04:59 similar to the way you can access OneDrive in Teams.
- 05:02 You can add those pretty easily by simply clicking Add Cloud Storage
- 05:07 in the Files tabs on Teams.
- 05:09 So we'll click Add File Storage and we'll add a Box account.
- 05:13 An important note here is that if you're trying to add a business Box account,
- 05:17 one that's for your entire company, you may want to use single sign on.
- 05:21 You'll be looking for instructions from your IT department if that's the case.
- 05:26 Otherwise, if it's a personal account, just use your personal login.
- 05:32 And now the files that are in the Box account are visible in Teams similar to
- 05:36 the way the files are in OneDrive are visible in team.
- 05:40 Again, these are not shared with the team by default.
- 05:42 It's necessary to go into Box to share those from here.
- 05:47 That's the difference from the Teams' files which are shared automatically with
- 05:50 the teams whenever you place them in the storage.
- 05:52 Finally, it is possible to add cloud storage in the channel as well.
- 05:57 In this case, you want to be sure that what you're adding is available to
- 06:01 everyone in the channel so that they'll have access to it.
- 06:04 The most common use case for
- 06:05 this is a SharePoint document library that you'd like to add to a team.
- 06:09 Because it's SharePoint Online, which is part of Office 365,
- 06:12 Your company will have access to it already, which is a great convenience.
- 06:16 So let's review using File Stores and Teams.
- 06:21 You can access files from personal cloud storage services in Teams.
- 06:25 By default, OneDrive is already accessible under the Files tab.
- 06:30 Now remember, OneDrive files are not shared by default.
- 06:34 And to share them you open the files in OneDrive which you can do directly in
- 06:37 the Teams interface.
- 06:40 On the other hand, files added to Teams are shared by default, and
- 06:44 Teams uses SharePoint Online behind the scenes.
- 06:48 You can add other file store services to Teams.
- 06:51 If it's a personal account, it works just like OneDrive.
- 06:54 If you have a corporate account for a file service, you can add those
- 06:58 to the Files tab of a channel where the files will then be accessible by all.
- 07:03 In our next lesson,
- 07:04 we'll talk about the fun topic of extending Teams by adding applications.
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