Team Spaces for Collaboration Using SharePoint or Other Platforms

Originally published on April 18, 2017

30th in a series of 50 Knowledge Management Components (Slide 40 in KM 102)

Team spaces: collaborative workspaces designed to allow teams to share documents, libraries, schedules, and files; conduct meetings, calls, surveys, and polls; and store meeting minutes, discussions, reports, and plans

Work teams, project teams, and communities all require tools that support collaboration. A team space is a site that enables team members to post and retrieve files, share information, and carry out group activities. If teams don’t have such a tool, they are faced with the need to send more email to one another, difficulty in locating required documents, and the possibility of losing access to critical information when one of the team members is unavailable or leaves the organization.

Using file shares, shared drives, and other ad hoc storage mechanisms is an unreliable way to collaborate. Providing a standard, readily-accessible, predictable, and backed-up environment enables effective and enduring collaboration to occur.

Following are guidelines for offering, creating, and using team spaces.

1. Make it fast and easy to create a team space using a self-service intranet site. Provide standard templates for work teams, project teams, and communities to use when creating new team spaces. These templates can provide a consistent look and feel, useful links, and required documents.
2. Establish and communicate rules for allowable file types, backup frequency, and storage quotas. Regularly communicate to users about inactive team spaces, storage usage, and maintenance schedules.
3. Define the team members and provide access for each of them. Define at least two administrators for each team space.
4. Provide a team roster page where members can post their photos, add links to personal sites, and describe their roles.
5. Establish rules that all files will be shared by posting to the team space, not by sending as email attachments. Remind new users about how to do this.
6. Set up recurring meetings in the team space so that for each meeting, there is a web page with the agenda, attendees, action items, and shared documents. Allow users to add their names to the attendee list.
7. Allow users to subscribe to alerts to be notified when new documents are posted to the team space or when other changes are made.
8. Use polls to conduct surveys, take votes, and make decisions.
9. Discourage team collaboration from taking place outside the team space. For example, project team members should not maintain any files on other sites.
10. Create a process for deciding on which files are kept in the team space, posted to reusable document repositories, archived, and deleted. Ensure that the process is followed.

Team Space Platforms

1. Alfresco by Hyland
2. Box
3. Chatter by Salesforce
4. Confluence by Atlassian
5. Dropbox Business
6. Google Workspace
7. HCL Connections
8. Ideagen Huddle
9. Igloo
10. Inmagic Presto by Lucidea
11. Intranet Connections
12. Jive by IgniteTech
13. Jostle
14. Liferay DXP
15. Microsoft 365 SharePoint
16. SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone
17. Same-Page
18. ThoughtFarmer
19. WebEx Messaging by Cisco
20. Workplace from Meta

There are also other platforms. Of all the team collaboration platforms, SharePoint is the most widely used.

Free Team Space/Web Site Platforms on the Internet

1. Google Sites — Example (and Drive, Docs, Calendar, Chat)
2. Groups.io — Example
3. Site123
4. Wix
5. WordPress

Resources

• SIKM Leaders Community threads on SharePoint
• Collaboration Platforms
• CMS Wire
• Real Story Group
• Essential SharePoint — Sue Hanley
• Michael Sampson
• Top Microsoft SharePoint Alternatives
• 13 Great Alternatives To SharePoint

Books

• Michael Sampson
• Sue Hanley
• Essential SharePoint® 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results
• Other SharePoint Books