Teams Tip 6: Using Sync – Accessing your team documents offline

November 18, 2019

When you save documents in Microsoft Teams, they are actually stored in a SharePoint site.

It’s important to remember that you can also access these documents offline. This is because SharePoint allows you to synchronize your documents with your desktop, making them available offline via Windows Explorer.

Additionally, if you have a latest version of Windows 10, you can use the new File On Demand feature, allowing you to set which files you want to make available offline. Otherwise files will be accessible via Windows Explorer but only when you are online.

In this series of quick tips we continue to spotlight a few easy ways to help you get more productive with Teams. Some of these may be new to you, while others may offer a helpful reminder of options you forgot were there.

Syncing files between your Teams channel and desktop

Here’s how you can take advantage of this functionality to synchronize files between your Microsoft Teams channel and your desktop:

Open Microsoft Teams
Select your team
Select your channel
Click on Files
Click on Open in
SharePoint

This will open a page in your default browser displaying all the files from your team’s channel. Since they are actually being stored in a SharePoint document library, we can use Sharepoint to set the sync properties for these files.

In SharePoint click on Sync

You will see the Getting ready to sync.. message

Note that, if you have not yet used the OneDrive Sync client, you will first need to provide a username to connect.
Next, confirm the location for the synchronized files.

Once the synchronization has completed, you can access these files from your browser.

Open Windows Explorer, select your company name (ex: SergePoint),
Select the name of the folder/channel that you have synchronized (ex: Team Ytria – General)

All synced files for that team channel are now accessible offline.