2019

Should I save my documents to OneDrive for Business or a

team site?

Its tempting to save all your documents to OneDrive for Business. The link to your OneDrive for Business library is always sitting there at the top of the page, ready for you to upload or create new documents. However, you also need to think about who can and cant access the documents you save to OneDrive for Business. If a document is a collaborative effort related to a project, then saving it to a team site might be a better choice. This article provides some guidelines to help you decide which route to go.

Save documents to OneDrive for Business when

• You dont plan to share them.
  Documents you place in OneDrive for Business are private by default, unless you place them in the Shared with Everyone folder. This makes OneDrive for Business your best option for draft documents or personal documents that no one else needs to see.

• You plan to share them, but they have a limited scope or lifecycle.
  You may sometimes work on documents that arent related to an ongoing project, which are important mostly to you, but that you still want to share. For example, perhaps youre writing an article to appear in a blog, and youd like to ask selected colleagues to review and edit it before you post it. In this case, you expect people to use the document once and then be done with it. People dont need any additional context information, or need to know where in particular youre keeping the document. All they need is a link to the document and editing permission.

• You cant identify an existing team site where your document belongs, and you dont think the purpose of the document warrants creating a new one.

Save documents to a team site library when

• You want team members to recognize the document as being relevant to an ongoing project.

• You want to spread ownership and permissions across a wider collection of people. If a document is important to the success of a project, its a good idea for there to be people other than yourself who can control what happens on the site.

• You want permissions to be granted on a site basis, instead of on individual documents. If people have access to the team site, then they have access to documents stored in the site.

• Other project-related documents are already saved to the team site library, and others expect to find it there.

• You want to create a check-in workflow that assigns the document to someone else.

Link to the full article