What are the best practices for sharing files in a virtual team?

I would utilize a collaboration tool such as M365 with OneDrive or Sharepoint. It's important PM office sets a folder structure so that, its managed well rather than an attachment dumping group.

In my experience I have found that the first step would be to list and research your needs before exploring platforms. Finding your true needs I have found will not only lead you to the best choice but as well help make your onboarding of that platform more efficient and effective. When looking looking at a platform as many have already stated partner with your IT Team as a platform may already be available in your organization but at the very least they can guide you on your organizations security policies and compliance to ensure not only your safety but anyone you will interact with through this platform. Lastly consider your audience as at the end of the day if they are unable to easily collaborate back your efforts will be for not.

When you are choosing a safe cloud platform for virtual collaboration follow your organization's guidelines. If your IT strategy is Microsoft-oriented - Microsoft 365 with OneDrive for personal data and SharePoint with Teams for team collaboration will work perfectly. In the case of using another platform like Google Workspace or another SaaS platform follow your IT recommendations. Centralization and standardization of the collaboration platform will increase adoption and reduce onboarding time. At the same time using one platform will help to improve security standards.

Not all companies have a PMO office. It is important to have a consistent structure regarding tools and filing system. Otherwise it is a real mess and trying to keep with each area system is 10000% inefficient.

A cloud-based platform can be a great solution but security requirements for the collaborative space need to be considered first. Think about legislation that may apply if you’re storing personally sensitive information or may want to in the future. Ensure there’s a robust identity and access management policy in place - often multi-party teams will have individuals roll off a project, it’s important to know up front how you’re going to protect your information.

Coming from a SharePoint angle, there was often an age old debate of "Folders are bad" you should use metadata. With the proliferation of Microsoft Teams usage as a collaboration platform (SharePoint still lives in back ground for file storage), we have kind of come back around to the folder scenario. Microsoft Teams provides more than just file sharing amongst your virtual team. In the same way that you may need to create a clear folder structure, having a clear and well thought out channel structure leads to a really nice user experience. A little context, every channel you create in a Team creates a folder in the SharePoint Document Library ??

Creating an intuitive folder structure and maintaining discipline around it makes everyone’s life easier. Some times the structure will be informed by a project management methodology - this is fine but make sure there’s flexibility so that people don’t start working on important documents in isolation.

I would recommend planning the way you want to store data and build reports on top of it. Use folders, metadata, and views/reports to build suitable business apps. Do not overcomplicate your solution. It has to be simple to not block users from using it. Try using workflow solutions to automate metadata set up to make your user's life easier.

We have tried various options, OneDrive has worked best for us. Everyone has the root folder synced to their local machines so they always have the latest documents with available with them. We have defined a template folder structure that can be copied for each new project, thus keeping things consistent across multiple projects.

A good folder structure is important, yet people will still struggle to find content in it. "Findeability" and navigability plays a key role for any type of document sharing. Make sure to test it with someone who is not familiar with your work, to see if they can find their way around.

Version control is one of those features that you don't think about until you absolutely need it. Choose a platform that offers built-in seamless versioning of changes so you always have the ability to revert to previous versions or see who's been wreaking havoc in your documents! Naming conventions are also really helpful but I believe these are most critical the higher you are in your Information Architecture (e.g., Project, Department, etc.) and a little less so down at the file level. This is especially true if you have the benefit of some of SharePoint's greatest features like Metadata, Content Types, and Views! ??

Also, archive ruthlessly - within months any folder of a lively and hard working team can become a graveyard of dead documents. Archive, archive, archive.

Version control and living documents are great unless you are the person doing merge control. Make sure you all have an agreed way of working. You can even post this at the top of the document. I.e. change tracking use and comment usage. Dont forget to @name people in comments if using m365.

The eLearning products that I help to create require a large number of different types of files, as well as multiple people inside and outside of my organization creating, reviewing, and updating them. Adopting clear file naming and version control has been an absolute lifesaver. In the past, missing or mislabeled files often had to be recreated and put back through our quality control processes, which cost a great deal of time and money. Adopting logical filenames and version control has saved us time, money, effort, and headaches. It may seem fussy and overly dogmatic, but standardizing and maintaining file naming conventions is absolutely crucial.

First, there are two very distinct different work environments: consumer products and industrial/regulated products. For the first a laisser-faire approach will do, but for industrial products with a long product-lifetime (e. g. airplanes) or with regulated areas (e. g. medical devices), you absolutely have to address those issues before you start doing any real work. Else it would be hell to clean up later... Get clear about what kind of version control you want to use, how to do baselines, branches, releases. Then decide who’s responsible for maintaining and validating what you agreed on: is it an element of the definition-of-done in an agile setup, or is it an element of a cross-cutting team? And most important: is the team ok with it?

As much as possible, move towards integrated real-time collaboration within the tools themselves, rather than dumping attachments into emails that reflect a point in time!

Doing an "in person" read through of key/high value sections of the document can often produce great results in terms of meaning what you say and saying what you mean. It helps when you read something and it feels clunky as you can then amend it. On that point also do in person amends for short corrections or do co-creation of content.

For those using the #Microsoft365 applications, communication and collaboration can be really simple ... if you use the tools correctly. And Microsoft Teams is THE hub for both - don't think of it as a chat and video call app, think of it as your virtual office. Teams provides the tools to communicate and collaborate with your colleagues, wherever you are, and wherever they are. Through Teams and channels, it's simple to enable collaboration within departments, projects, or knowledge communities. Conversations, documents, tasks, notes, web apps, reports, and so much more - all in one place, and all updatable by the team at the same time. By utilising all the M365 apps through Teams, you can easily build a cohesive, remote team.

With the way how technology is constantly evolving, finding a need to have better lines of communication and ease of access to it is vital. Always make a note of specific files and move further into integrating opening web links such as Adobe, etc.

1. Consider findability of information when planning out where and how it will be saved. If no one can find your good work, it will never be appreciated, and someone is liable to redo what you've already done. 2. Consider security and minimizing the overhead of complex permission management when planning a structure and tool for storing enterprise content. 3. Consider syncing to local machines and mobile devices. All too often we focus solely on a desktop and online-only experience when planing our file architecture. What will it look like when synced via OneDrive (or other tool) to your mobile phone? Will it still make sense?

Agree definition of done and who is going to distribute the document further. I have seen too often documents going to a client that should have gone through a governance or sanity check. Check your document metadata. This can expose some internal secrets!

Before you will start sharing your data with external users do the proper planning to limit the risk around data leaks. Prepare the process to validate and maintain the access.

Depending on project setup you want to clearly define access rights (read/write etc) based on roles and type of information shared.

Stay aware that the world is diverse: collaboration approaches working in US or India, might not work in Europe, and vice versa. If you do a small mobile app, you will probably have no issues anyhow. But for anything more complicated, you will need to be aware of cultural and regulatory differences. Americans might smile about the potential involvement of a work councils in an European company, and Europeans might smile about work tracking features in American companies. Other countries might have technical issues in reaching your collaboration platform, like latency behaviour or security topics. So, the quintessence is don't just decide on something, but first talk with each other - it saves you lot of effort later on!