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#44 - Use shared documents for planning and managing

  1. Teaching is increasingly complex, with contributions from many people in many formats to plan and bring together in a managed way.
  2. Teaching teams are growing in size and diversity, often including people from multiple departments or from outside of the university.
  3. Time is precious - we have enough meetings as it is, so why not make the most of our online collaboration space to save time and reduce meetings.
Solution overview

Office 365 allows us to easily share and collaborate on documents - for example, module plans in Word, or resource tracking spreadsheets in Excel. Sharing through a Microsoft Teams space is the most effective route. You can track changes, add notes, and discuss documents. By setting up a series of channels, you can create a workflow - for example, a proposals channel, then move the document to a working on channel, then to a channel for completed documents.

Process
  1. If you haven't already got a Microsoft Teams space in which you can collaborate, read this recipe to find out more.
  2. Check that everyone who needs access is a member of the team in the Teams space.
  3. If the file already exists on your own computer, you will need to upload it into a channel in the Teams space. You can do this from within the conversation in a channel, and it will be added to the Files tab. Alert the other people you want to collaborate with by mentioning them in the conversation and telling them about the file (use the @ to send a notification to people).