Thanks George for the informative email.
I have been in touch with Kate separately off-list and provided some observations from our experience over the past 18 months. We have until end December to complete the migration of our current SharePoint 2013 environment (235 root sites) to SharePoint Online (SPO). Interestingly (perhaps), we have created more SPO sites now than we have migrated - we now have more than 310 SPO sites including the sites that were migrated.
We have Teams in our Office 365 environment (a Church-based not-for-profit organisation with 9,000 staff spread geographically across New South Wales) but we control the creation of new Teams to 'contain' SharePoint. Teams is somewhat popular mostly for the instant messaging functionality and, for those areas that use it, for Teams chat and collaboration.
It is really important to understand the centrality of Office 365 Groups to the Office 365 environment in this discussion. Every O365 Group has an associated SharePoint site; unless you control it, every Team in Teams also creates both an O365 Group and a SharePoint site. The same for Yammer groups (if you allow it).
In our environment only the two SharePoint Admins (myself included) have the ability to create new SharePoint sites OR Office 365 Groups (as these also create SP sites); O365 Group creation is limited to the (2) members of a dedicated Security Group. All our sites belong/fall under to a business function. When someone asks us about creating a Team in MS Teams, we check with them to ensure they understand that we will create (a) an O365 Group using our naming conventions (O365_GRP_name or O365_PRJ_name for projects), and (b) a SharePoint site and then link the new Team in MS Teams to that Group, not the other way around. I create all new O365 Groups from the Groups section of the main O365 Admin Portal.
This process ensures we maintain control over the SP environment and naming consistency. If you don't have these controls in place you could end up SharePoint sites created from Teams or Yammer or Outlook with very little control. This is a recipe for the same network file share mayhem that exists in many organisations.
It is also important to know that while only Admin-created sites could be seen in the 'classic' SPO Admin Portal, the new Admin Portal shows ALL SP sites including those created via O365 Groups.
For reference, our SP environment (on-premise and online) is where we keep our digital records. As noted, sites map to business functions, the document libraries map to business activities (which is also a really important thing to control). We don't use Content Types very much except where required for certain types of controlled records (our staff files for example), and most of the metadata is set per library or sometimes per site. We have started to apply 'classification policies' (mapped to our records retention schedules) set in the Security and Compliance Admin centre to document libraries. Some (mostly project) SP sites have a site retention policy.
And we also manage our physical legacy records in SharePoint as well.
I'm always happy to respond to questions, should you have any.
Andrew Warland
Sydney, Australia
