As your friend, I have to let you know that you might be oversharing… but only with regard to your Teams and SharePoint sites! As a Team owner, it never hurts to review your Team permissions now and then, and this would be a great one to double check. The good news is, if you are oversharing, this is very fixable.

Private and Public Teams

When you set up a new Team group, one of the first decisions you face is this one: Private or Public?

As the prompt suggests:

A Private team requires that the Team owner grant permission for someone to join as a member.
A Public Team can be joined by anybody without approval of, or even notification to, the Team owner.

If you have marked your team as Public, any user within our organization, meaning WSU faculty, staff, and students, can click Join a Team, browse or search the list, and join your team group without you receiving any sort of prompt or notification.

SharePoint Access and Public Teams

The inherent intentions of Teams as a collaborative tool presents a particularly concerning behavior with Public Teams. As we discuss in Teams training, every Team group is powered by a SharePoint site. In the case of a Public Team, this SharePoint site is also public, but is also a Team type of SharePoint site, designed for collaboration.

This means that, in your Public Team, any user within WSU can use the M365 search to find files contained in your Team, visit the associated site, edit the files, and even delete or move files.

Below is a SharePoint site that is tied to a Public Team. I am not a member of this Team, and yet I can delete this file I have selected in the image, edit it, move it, rename it, and so on.

This is the default behavior of a Public Team: anybody is supposed to be able to join in on the collaboration. This may not have been what you thought you were signing up for when you made a public Team.

If this is not your intentions, and you still have your heart set on a Public Team, there are ways to adjust permissions on files and folders. We discuss this type of permission adjustment in Teams Advanced training and SharePoint training (visit myTraining for times and registration).

More often than not, however, when I discuss this default behavior with people, they choose to make their Team Private.

View or Edit Team Privacy

If, at this point, you are a concerned Team owner, here is how you can check or alter your Team privacy.

1. In your Team group, go to the More menu (…) next to the Team name and select Manage Team.

2. Go to the Settings tab and Edit.

3. Here you can view or alter your Team’s privacy settings.

Another Option: Join with a Code

Looking for a compromise? Here is another option that might interest you: Join with a Code.

If you want to allow only specific users to join your Team and collaborate, you can mark your Team as Private, and enable Join with a Code.

Go back to your Manage Team screen.

Visit your Settings tab, and under Team Code click Generate.

From your prospective member’s perspective, they will go to Join Team, and enter the code you give them where prompted (below).

At any point, you can return to the Team Settings to Remove the code you created. This will prevent new members from accessing Team.

Other Concerns?

Were you oversharing? Do you have concerns about previously public files? You can visit your File Details in SharePoint to see if any edits have been made to files, and by whom.

And, as always, feel free to reach out and we can help you take a look at your site. The Technology Help Desk can be reached at: (316) 978 4357, option 1; or helpdesk@wichita.edu.

Training Opportunities

Don’t forget to visit myTraining for live training sessions on Teams and SharePoint. Sessions are available to faculty and staff at WSU. I hope to see you there!

Now that nearly 200 of you have come through SharePoint training and have gone on to manage your own SharePoint sites, your document libraries are probably bursting at the seams with documents and folders. One tool we look at in SharePoint 2: Site Creation Basics training is the ability to create columns to help organize site files. If you liked learning about columns, you will love content types!

Content types will give you the ability, among other things, to apply columns to specific files, and effectively filter by files with similar column structures.

Check out the video below, with examples and instructions for building your own content types.

Video: Content Types

If the screen is too small to view embedded, click on the video title to open in a new screen.

Written Instructions

You just saw content types in action, so here are the steps I took in the video in written form.

Create a Content Type

The first step is to create your content type(s).

1. Go to Site Contents > Site Settings

2. Select Content Types under Web Designer Galleries. Note that this may appear on the left side of the screen in the case of Communications sites.

3. Select Create Content Type.

4. Name your content type. If the name is already in use in columns on your site, you will be prompted to pick a different name.

- For Parent Category, select Document Content Types.
- For Content Type, select Document.

5. Select Add Site column and add as many columns as you would like. The column types and options are the same that you see when we added columns to a site library in SharePoint 2 training.

Add Content Type to a Site Library

Your content type is created, so now you can add it to any of your site document libraries.

Go to your document library and select Add Column. Scroll down and select Add a content type

2. Select your custom content type.

Assign a Content Type to Documents in the Library

At this point, the content type has been created and applied to a library. Now it is available to add to specific files.

Select any files to which you would like to apply the new content type. Go to Details (“i” in the upper right).

2. Under Content Type, select your custom content type.

3. Review the pane for your columns, and press Save.

Add Desired Data to New Columns

Just like any other columns, you will need to fill in the values for the custom content fields. Having labeled your documents as their new content types, you can go to the details of each file and fill in the custom columns, even though these columns are not readily in view.

Select each file that has the custom content type applied and go to details (“i” in the upper right). Complete any desired fields. In my case, there were two new fields: a person field and a yes/no field.

Filter by Content Type to See Columns

Now that your content types have been created, applied to a library, and applied to specific documents, you can filter by a content type to view the custom columns.

In the upper right view settings, go to All Documents and find your custom content type fields in the list.

Your custom columns with any completed data will appear. To go back to the previous view, click on the same dropdown menu and select All Documents.

Wrapping Up and More Resources

Well, what do you think? I hope this was a helpful trick as you are organizing your SharePoint document libraries! This is a somewhat advanced look at SharePoint organization, so if you are unfamiliar with SharePoint, this may sound a little confusing. If so, here are some more resources for you.

Resources from ITS

ITS has two SharePoint training offerings available:

- SharePoint 1: Foundations
- SharePoint 2: Site Creation Basics

Visit myTraining to view the training schedule, sign up for SharePoint sessions and look for other Microsoft Cloud sessions, like OneDrive and Teams.

Resources from Microsoft

Here is some information about content types from Microsoft:

Category: SharePoint

Are You Oversharing? 🗣️Public Versus Private Teams