SharePoint vs. Teams – Understanding The Differences Between Microsoft’s Collaboration Tools

WRITTEN BY

Mark Adams

POSTED ON

November 20, 2018

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Categories: Collaboration

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SharePoint vs. Teams – Understanding The Differences Between Microsoft’s Collaboration Tools

While both SharePoint and Microsoft Teams facilitate collaboration, they’re different tools with different goals. With SharePoint already being a significant part of many organization’s business processes — and Microsoft Teams being the newer next-generation collaboration system — many organizations may wonder how both tools will fit in to their existing workflows and technologies.

SHAREPOINT VS. TEAMS: NOT A COMPETITION

While there are differences between Teams and SharePoint, it’s not an either/or scenario. These tools do different things but work well together with other Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) tools like all Microsoft products. These software platforms have evolved over the years, however. A decade ago, businesses used SharePoint for document consolidation, Skype for instant communication and Outlook for messaging and planning. SharePoint has evolved into a robust document-sharing center with shared workspaces, storage and presentation capabilities.

Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, has a more over-arching goal. Microsoft Teams consolidates every aspect of business collaboration — not just document management and sharing activities. Employees can track their instant messaging, email, calendars, projects and more through Microsoft Teams.

Yet this doesn’t mean that Microsoft Teams replaces SharePoint — far from it. It means that Microsoft Teams works better with Microsoft Teams SharePoint integration. SharePoint provides a much more advanced set of features that Microsoft Teams can pull from due to its robust features and general employee familiarity with the product.

TEAMS SITE VS. SHAREPOINT SITES: HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT?

When looking at a Teams site vs SharePoint site, you will notices differences in the software. SharePoint is primarily a document management and intranet platform, while Microsoft Teams is a collaboration hub emphasizing real-time communication and teamwork. SharePoint offers robust content management capabilities, whereas Teams focuses on fostering collaboration through chat, meetings and app integrations. Depending on your organization’s needs, you may use SharePoint, Teams, or both together to enhance your collaboration experience.

Some of the key differences between SharePoint and Teams include:

Goals of the Software

SharePoint: SharePoint is primarily a document management and intranet platform. It focuses on content storage, organization and collaboration, allowing users to create, share and manage documents, sites and lists.

Teams: Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is a collaboration hub that integrates various tools and services to enable teamwork and communication. It offers chat-based collaboration, audio/video meetings, file sharing and app integrations.

Communication and Collaboration Features

SharePoint: SharePoint provides basic communication features such as document commenting and version control. It allows multiple users to collaborate on documents simultaneously, but it lacks real-time chat and direct communication capabilities.

Teams: Microsoft Teams emphasizes real-time communication and collaboration. It offers instant messaging, audio/video conferencing, screen sharing and presence indicators. Teams enable users to collaborate in channels, have private conversations and integrate external apps and services.

Team Organization

SharePoint: SharePoint organizes content hierarchically, with sites, sub-sites, libraries and lists. It allows granular permissions and access controls to manage document sharing and collaboration within teams or departments.

Teams: Microsoft Teams focuses on organizing collaboration around teams and channels. End-users in Teams can have multiple channels for specific topics or projects, and each channel contains conversations, files and other collaborative elements.

Integration

SharePoint: SharePoint integrates well with other Microsoft products and services, such as Office 365, OneDrive and Outlook. It provides document co-authoring capabilities with Office apps, and it can be customized using SharePoint Framework (SPFx) to build custom solutions.Teams: Microsoft Teams acts as a central hub for various integrations and apps. It integrates with many Microsoft services, including SharePoint, OneDrive and more. Additionally, Teams offers an extensive range of third-party app integrations, allowing users to bring external tools and services into their collaboration environment.

Customization

SharePoint: SharePoint is highly customizable. It provides advanced capabilities for building custom workflows, forms and web parts. Developers can leverage SharePoint’s APIs and development frameworks to create tailored solutions.

Teams: While Teams does not offer the same level of customization as SharePoint, it provides app development capabilities through the Microsoft Teams Platform. Developers can build custom tabs, bots and connectors to extend Teams’ functionality and integrate external services.

SHAREPOINT + TEAMS: COLLABORATION POWERHOUSE

When used together, SharePoint’s robust document management system can seamlessly integrate with the Microsoft Teams environment, creating a complete collaboration solution. Microsoft Teams has specifically been designed to leverage existing Microsoft collaboration tools and provides more value with these additional solutions in place.

The advantage of a Microsoft Teams/SharePoint integration include:

  • Easily sync and access all the files for a specific Team in a single consolidated platform.
  • Acquiring automatic previews (through SharePoint) in the Microsoft Teams channel tabs, making it easier to find needed documents.
  • Protecting and securing files while adhering to document retention strategies that help alleviate the risk of data loss.
  • Quickly discovering and searching files through a single consolidated query
  • Placing documents directly in tabs to review and modify.
  • Linking to documents directly within conversations to keep the flow of dialogue and the topic clear.

There are additional advanced features available, such as the ability to build out a SharePoint news site and add a news site as a tab — so team members are able to review stats and other vital information in a concise and customized format. SharePoint is frequently used to create custom dashboards within an internal network; this feature can be augmented by using Microsoft Teams.

Through Microsoft Teams SharePoint integration, team members can easily access and modify their files through the Microsoft Teams platform, while also having convenience features — such as the ability to easily preview documents — already in place. This feature is a distinct advantage of using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint together, rather than considering the utilities as a case of SharePoint vs. Teams.

Apart from this, utilizing SharePoint also means that employees can leverage a solution that they are already familiar with, making it easier and more intuitive.

Microsoft Teams provides many collaborative solutions, many of which let you leverage Microsoft Collaboration Tools like never before. If it’s time for your business to switch over to Microsoft Teams, Red River offers business customers training, support and installation of these products to help maximize your investment. Contact Red River today to start your Microsoft subscription off on the right track.