Team Up with SoftwareONE: How to aggregate document libraries in Windows File Explorer

From Microsoft Teams to OneDrive for Business to SharePoint, we are now using a variety of tools that make collaboration and our work life a lot easier. Despite all these benefits it can be quite challenging to keep an overview of all your documents within these different tools. The solution? Windows File Explorer! In the third part of our series we explain why it is the ultimate aggregator of all document libraries.

Admittedly, File Explorer may sound a bit 1995,but it actually makes a lot of sense. With Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint we have many different storage locations for files, and it may be difficult to get an overview.

Wouldn’t it be useful to have all files in one place? File Explorer in Windows 10 is the ultimate aggregator for all document libraries in Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint. It has the potential to become your single point of access for all documents and therefore functions like a dashboard that gives you a perfect overview of all your files. You can manage your documents in File Explorer and avoid a proliferation of folders.

Synchronizing all your document libraries to your file explorer has many advantages:

• All your files are in one place
• You get a dashboard overview
• Your documents are still online
• Your documents are accessible from any device, anytime anywhere
• When necessary you can take your documents offline and edit them wherever you are; once you are online again your folders will be synchronized and up-to-date.  When offline it’s important to understand that it’s not possible to work on documents at the same time. To avoid confusion, you should take a look at your documents through the SharePoint portal to ensure that co-authoring is not happening when you are offline.

Let’s take Microsoft Teams as an example. In Teams you have different sites and channels within those sites that work as subfolders. You don’t have to synchronize all subfolders individually. You can easily replicate the whole site with all its channels and documents in your file explorer.

Step 1: Go to the main navigation of a Teams Site and choose the “Files” tab

Step 2: Click on “Open in SharePoint”

Step 3: Go to the root of your document library

Step 4: Choose the “Synch” function to synchronize all of the channel file folders to File Explorer

Channel File folders synched to File Explorer

Step 5 Confirm “change apps”

Step 6: Replicate folder structure

Your Teams site with all its channels file folders will then be available on your File Explorer neatly organized!

The personal value of synching your OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint documents to File Explorer is that it will save you time and make it easier for you to access your documents anywhere, anytime and one any device. File Explorer becomes the ultimate aggregator of all your document libraries!