What goes in SharePoint (and what does not)

SharePoint vs. Shared Drive vs. OneDrive

Your OneDrive is your default save location but it is “for your eyes only” and cannot be accessed by others.  It is best to use it as a “work in progress” area for documents you intend to share or for any items you don’t want to share with others.

SharePoint and shared drives are for collaborating on items.  Large media files (e.g., videos) and databases do not work well in SharePoint and must be stored in the shared drive.

All other shared files should go in SharePoint.

What should I read in SharePoint?

SharePoint is divided into 5 areas—Information for All Staff (IFAS) and then the 4 major sub-areas of Campus Wellness.  Please familiarize yourself with the information/documents in IFAS and your sub-area's section.

Guidelines and Recommendations for Using SharePoint

Finding Items

Use the Search field to find items. It will search both the file names and the contents of files to provide you with matches.

Creating Items

• Users can create files either from SharePoint or from MS Office.

• Creating files from within SharePoint allows you to easily save the file in the exact location you want without having to save anything to your local drive.

• Creating files from MS Office requires you to save a local copy and then upload that to SharePoint.

Naming Items

Sort Order

Be mindful that SharePoint will sort your items in alphanumeric order by default (i.e., special characters then numbers then alphabetically—see example below for the order in which they will appear)

1. _folder

2. 1folder

3. Folder

Versioning

• Version Control is turned on so if you replace a file with one of the exact same name, SharePoint stores the previous version(s) in a way that’s easy to access.

• There is no need to create multiple versions of the same file (e.g., MyFile – v1.docx, MyFile – v2.docx). Instead, simply open, modify, and save the existing file or upload/drag-and-drop one of the same name and overwrite it.

Dates

If files or folders require any part of a date (e.g., the entire date or just the year), please put the date FIRST and use the following structure:

Redundancy

Avoid repeating information in file/folder names.

Sub-levels

Keep the number of sub-levels to a minimum (no more than 3-4 levels, where possible)

Permissions

• Existing items can be edited by any user who has access.

• Items can be added to existing folders by any user who has access.

• Items can be restricted to users. Setting up restrictions to items requires a ticket to Tech Support and subsequent approval by the SWG committee.

• Items for the front page require a ticket to Tech Support and subsequent approval by the SWG committee.

Sharing Documents

Don't email documents, put them in SharePoint and send a link to the document so others can see it. This includes sending agendas for meetings, just send a link to it in SharePoint.

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