If you’ve ever used Google Drive or iCloud you’ve used a File Sync and Share (FSS) system – but are you using it properly? How you use these systems for your organization could be the difference between easily sharing documents among your team, and lost versions.

The four main FSS systems are Google Drive (G-suite), iCloud (Apple), One-Drive and/or SharePoint (Microsoft 365), and DropBox. Any of these can be used to easily access files across personal devices, but did you know you can use FSS to also share documents among multiple users?

SharePoint can be an incredibly useful and time-saving tool for your business – if you use it properly, including giving the right permissions to the right people, using version control, and ensuring employees know not to save documents to personal accounts.

Here are our top tips for successfully implementing SharePoint (or any FSS system) within your organization:

Use Document Versioning

Always turn on Document Version Control. Mistakes happen – the wrong edits are accidentally saved, paragraphs get deleted. Having the ability to track and recover past versions of documents can be a life-saver (and project-saver).

Ask Employees to Turn on Alerts

When a number of people are responsible for contributing to a document, it can be easy to lose track of who edited it last, what your next steps need to be, or when your deadlines are. Alerts can help keep projects on track and ensure deadlines are met.

Standard Naming Conventions

Creating and implementing a standard naming convention for all of your team’s documents can help keep things organized and make it easier for everyone to find documents they need (without having to open 5 documents to see what’s what).

When you’re creating these naming conventions, ensure your teams know now to include spaces in the names. SharePoint in particular will replace spaces with characters, making everything look like a confusing, haphazard mess. Try “InfotechMontrealServices” instead of “Info-Tech Montreal Services”, for example.

Allow Co-Authoring

There is nothing more frustrating than having time to finally get to work on a project, double-clicking on a file to pull up the document, and getting the notice “File is Locked for Editing,” meaning someone else has it open and all you can do is read it. Perhaps not a massive deal in small teams, but walking around a building asking “do you have this open?” is a time-suck if we’ve ever seen one!

If your FSS doesn’t allow this natively, be sure to turn on co-authoring. This allows multiple people to edit a document simultaneously, not only saving individual team members frustration, but allowing deadlines to be met even faster.

FSS Systems can be a big time-saver for your business. If you’re having trouble getting yours set-up or properly managing it, send us a message. We can ensure all of your shared documents are organized with root folders first for better organization, and of course backups to prevent data loss in the event of a disaster and keep your system running smoothly.