13 Jul 2021 – I pulled my head out of my files in Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive folders for a bit to figure out the Office365 offerings of OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, due to institutional collaborative needs. The options accumulated over the years and access was not always smooth but is much better now.
It just took one article – “The Document circle of Life” by MS’ Matt Wade (2019) explained the use of OneDrive vs SharePoint, amongst other things, and this sums it up: “OneDrive is for my stuff and SharePoint is for our stuff.
Simultaneous collaborative use of Office documents has been robust now, and was very helpful during the staff recruitment exercises I conducted last year. I realised SharePoint had finally caught up with Google Drive and its precedents which I had been using since 2006.
Sharepoint interface on web, desktop and phone, syncs in seconds now.
The SharePoint web interface has clean lines and is syncing quite well with desktop and phone. And since both staff and students have Office 365 with 1TB of storage, I will shift research students from Dropbox to SharePoint – it will be especially helpful when reviewing their drafts close to deadlines, when there is often simultaneous use.
A couple of friends love MS Teams for project supervision but I am happy to avid it for now, although NUS adds our classes to that interface for us.
Dropbox is the most seamless cloud platform for documents and revision histories, so I still use that. Google Drive seems best for collaboration with volunteers, especially for photo sharing. And after Dropbox messed up my Keynote presentations once, I keep those in Apple’s iCloud.
It is good to have all these options now, and I just need to step back to review capabilities every now and then. Like I do with backup!
Otterman speaks... 