Saving stuff with OneDrive

Your personal storage location, known as OneDrive, is designed as a place to store, organize, and share your documents, such as, for example, a carpool list you’re working on or a potluck spreadsheet. You might also be working on business documents that don’t really fit into any specific app in SharePoint. Your OneDrive is the catch-all place you can store it.

Think of your OneDrive as your personal Documents folder on your computer. The difference is that the personal Documents folder on your computer is only on that single computer. If you’re using a different computer, you can’t access those documents. In addition, if your computer crashes and you have not backed up your Documents folder, then those files are lost. OneDrive is designed to be a secure and safe place to store all your documents. What if your device crashes or is stolen? With your documents stored in OneDrive, you just log in again from a different device and continue working on your documents.

Your OneDrive files are only secure and backed up if your IT team sets up the infrastructure that way. If you’re using SharePoint Online, then you can be assured that Microsoft is doing this for you. If your local IT team is running SharePoint for you, then check with them to make sure they back up and secure your OneDrive documents.

Your OneDrive is designed to live in the cloud and to be accessible by any device you happen to be working on. For example, if you start a document at work and then have to stop working on it when you leave to pick up your kids, you can log in and continue working on the document when you get home. And if you later have to take your mother-in-law to the doctor, and you take your tablet with you, you can log in from your tablet while you’re waiting in the doctor’s office. Finally, if, you drop off your mother-in-law and make a quick stop at the grocery store, and you get an email on your smartphone asking about a detail in the document you have been working on, you can connect to your OneDrive on your smartphone and view the document so you can respond to the inquiry. Being this connected isn’t always the best way to spend your off-time, but OneDrive enables you to decide when and where you want to work. The idea behind OneDrive is that when you need your documents, you can access them as long as you can connect to the Internet.

The OneDrive discussed in this chapter is called OneDrive for Business, and it is designed for organizations and is part of SharePoint. A consumer version of OneDrive is also available at https://onedrive.live.com, but it is not part of SharePoint. It is a completely separate offering designed for general consumers, not organizations and business. When using the consumer version, your files are stored in the cloud on Microsoft servers. The consumer version of OneDrive is similar to other cloud storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

Creating or uploading documents in your OneDrive

When you first land on your OneDrive page, you are presented with a notice letting you know that OneDrive for Business is a place to store, sync, and share your documents. You can add documents to OneDrive by following these steps:

1. Navigate to your OneDrive page by clicking the OneDrive app in the waffle at the top of the SharePoint window (refer to Figure 15-1).

   If you are using SharePoint Online, then you won’t have any trouble finding OneDrive because Microsoft has already set it up for you. If you are using SharePoint On-Premises, then you will only find the waffle menu and the OneDrive app in the waffle menu if your administrator has set it up for you. If you don’t see the waffle menu, or if you don’t see the OneDrive app in the waffle menu, then contact your administrator to get things set up.

2. Click the New link at the top of the page and select the type of document you want to create, as shown in Figure 15-3.

   If you are using SharePoint Online, then you already have the Office document types (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) integrated with your OneDrive site because Microsoft has already set it up for you. If you are using SharePoint On-Premises, then you will only see these document types if they have been set up. If the integration has not been set up, then you will see a dialog box that lets you choose to upload an existing file already.

3. The document you created opens and you can add content.
4. On the other hand, if you want to upload an existing document, you can click the Upload button instead of the New button (Step 2) and then browse to the document you want to add to OneDrive and click OK to add the file.

You can choose to overwrite the document if a document with the same name already exists. If versioning is turned on, a new version of the document will be created and the existing document will be the previous version. If versioning is turned off, then overwriting will result in the loss of the existing document with the same name.

The OneDrive site contains a number of views. You can see all of the documents you have recently worked on and all of the documents that are shared with you. You access these views by clicking on the links in the left hand navigation (refer to Figure 15-2).

Following a document from another site

A modern organization generates an unbelievable amount of digital content. The sheer number of digital documents can be beyond comprehension. SharePoint is a product that was developed from the beginning to help manage digital content. As each team begins using SharePoint, it can become burdensome to navigate to each site and monitor each document. You might get carpal tunnel from so much clicking! The Newsfeed app pulls together into one nice view all the documents that you are working on, that have been shared with you, or that you are following. Accessing these views can be achieved by clicking the waffle button and choosing the Newsfeed app. To follow a document and add it to the Followed view on your Newsfeed, follow these steps:

1. Browse to the Library app that contains the document you want to follow.

2. Click the ellipsis next to the document and click Follow, as shown in Figure 15-6.

   A dialog box pops up in the upper-right corner of the screen, letting you know you are now following the document.

3. Navigate to your Newsfeed by clicking the waffle and choosing the Newsfeed app.

4. The document you just followed appears front and center under the Following view, as shown in Figure 15-5.

   The documents you follow are displayed along with the web address of the document. To the right of the link you can click an X to stop following the document.

Reaching out with a blog

You can share information within your company in many ways. You can send an email, publish a document to your portal, or maybe go old-school and leave a hard copy on everyone’s desk.

But nothing really compares to a good blog. It’s a bit like reading a book with really short chapters. As shown in Figure 15-5, your Newsfeed has a link to your own personal blog. Clicking that link actually does just that — it creates your very own blog site with an entry that lets everyone know to stay tuned to hear from you.

Your blog is provisioned when you first click the Blog link on your Newsfeed page. The direct URL to your blog is configured based on how SharePoint was set up. An example is

http://portalintegrators.com/my/personal/rosemarie/Blog/

Your blog posts show up on your Newsfeed and the Newsfeed of anyone following you.

As shown in Figure 15-7, your blog site contains some useful links. Notice that you see Categories on the left side and a link to add a new category. You also see an Archives section that shows you past months. This makes is easy for readers of your blog to navigate through and find topics of interest.

On the right side, you have links to the blog tools. Here you can create, edit, and delete posts and manage comments that people make on your blog.

So what is so special about a blog? Nothing, really, except for the content you create in it. Blogging is not for everyone, but if you feel like sharing your thoughts with your colleagues, and you know that you can post at least a few times a month, your blog might be compelling to your coworkers.

Writing in your blog is a great way to communicate what you’re working on, your ideas about the latest company initiative, or what’s going on in your life that you think others may find interesting. The topic of your blog can be about a single thing or can range from the Amazon to Zambia. It doesn’t really matter (unless you start violating some company blogging policies), but what matters to your readers is that you create posts that are interesting to read and you’re updating your blog on a somewhat regular basis.

Creating a holistic profile experience

The first part of creating your profile is to take a look at what properties are there by default. Many of the basic properties come from Active Directory (AD), but depending on how SharePoint was set up, you could also see information from other systems as well. The AD properties that typically show up in user profiles include your name, title, department, manager, and some contact information such as your work phone.

You can update other properties on your profile page, such as About Me, your picture, your location, your home phone, your skills, interests, and projects you’ve worked on in the past. All this extra information creates a much better sense of who you are than just the basic information about who you work for and where you are.

These properties can be edited by clicking your name in the upper-right corner of the screen and selecting About Me. When you’re on your profile page, click the Edit Your Profile link to add in your information.

After browsing around your profile and the different sections of it, you may think of properties in the Outlook address book that should be in SharePoint profiles. Ask your SharePoint administrator to get those properties into SharePoint. This task is done in SharePoint Central Administration for SharePoint On-Premises or in the SharePoint Online administration area of Office 365.

Filling in your profile information

It seems like practically everyone in the world is familiar with social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and Microsoft has taken some cues to extend that social networking functionality into SharePoint. It all starts with sharing some information about yourself so that other people in your organization can find you and read a little about you. That’s where the basic profile information comes into play.

Along with the really basic information that comes from Active Directory (AD), you also see About Me, Picture, and Ask Me About fields when editing your profile, as shown in Figure 15-10. These items are shared with everyone, unlike some of the extra information we cover next.

The information you share in the About Me and Ask Me About fields should be what you want people to know about you as it relates to what you do at your company. There’s really no need to share your love of pet rats (unless your business caters to owners of pet rats). Rather, share a little bit about where you came from, what you like to work on, and when you started at the company — keep it simple and useful for others.

In the Ask Me About section, put in what you’re really good at, work-wise, and things that people might want to know more about you if they knew you had the same interests or a particular knowledge of something they need to know more about. But again, keep it business-related, because this information is shared with everyone.

For your picture, we recommend one of you in business attire rather than the one of you sunburned and on the beach. Remember, the picture you share here shows up in SharePoint, attached to documents you’ve created, or when you show up in search results. A picture is really helpful, for example, if you work in a large organization, and even a small- to medium-sized organization where people don’t work in the same location. Maybe all the employees of your company are so distributed that they don’t all get together but once every year or two, so being able to place a face with a name can help bridge that gap of unfamiliarity. (We’ve been in many situations where the voice doesn’t go at all with the eventual face when we met them in person — a profile picture helps to alleviate some of that awkwardness.)

For administrators and managers, remember that if one person in the organization updates their profile, it’s a start but it’s really not that useful. But if everyone does, it becomes a great place to get to know who you work with, what motivates people, and what they’re good at. Your challenge is to come up with a contest or some type of incentive program for getting employees to fill out their profiles.

Filling in the rest of your profile is up to you. One of the cool features of the Contact Information, Details, Newsfeed Settings, and Language and Region sections of your profile is that you can choose who you share that information with. You can choose to share it with everyone or keep it to yourself.

If you are using SharePoint Online, then you will find that the About Me page is actually part of a new app called Delve. Delve is an exciting new app that is built into SharePoint Online. It is designed to help you take control of the digital mountain that overloads the modern world. Rosemarie is writing an entire book called Office 365 Apps For Dummies, in which Delve is a major feature. There are actually a number of these new, and very powerful Office 365 Apps and thus why Rosemarie took on writing an entire book about them!