Now that Microsoft has allotted 25 GB per user of storage in OneDrive for Business, an interesting question has arose – “When should I use OneDrive vs. a Team Site?” This is an important question that might not arise if there wasn’t so much space available per user. And with on premise deployments, you’re probably not deploying that much space per user, so this becomes less relevant.
Thankfully Microsoft has published some guidance around this topic. Although that guidance is relatively intuitive, you want to use Team Sites for any of the following conditions:
1. If you want to use features or functionality such as: Calendars, Task Lists, Workflow, Forms, apply Metadata, or apply a disposition policy.
2. If the document has a defined corporate value or requires retention.
3. If you plan to share the document with a wide audience – although OneDrive for Business does have the ‘Shared with Everyone’ folder and you can manually share the file to any number of users. Managing permissions is much more efficient at the site level. I would not recommend managing a plethora of user permissions on individual documents in OneDrive for Business, you’ll be creating unnecessary headaches for yourself.
4. If the file is relative to an existing project, group, or meeting that already has a Team Site.
I put together a quick decision tree to help illustrate. (click to see the full size image) There are lots of gray areas with this topic, as it is very new. However, I think this will help guide you on the right path. If you need more general information on OneDrive, see my post from last month.
