how to create a document library without creating a group?

Question

We are a small company of 3 people with Office 365 Business Premium. We only need the companies documents available to all users in Windows Explorer and occasionally on a smartphone or tablet. Since the new OneDrive client was released early this year we were - for the first time in 2 years - a little bit happy with the filesharing part of Office 365.

We do not use or need any of the online collaboration features of SharePoint. But when we need a new directory tree in our <companyname> folder I learned that I need to go online and create a "Site", go to the "Documents" library of that site and synchronize it to all PC's and laptops.

Yesterday I created a new site this way, I had not done it for a few months. About an hour after I did that we all got an email "You've joined the <sitename> group" with the same name. The content of the email is in terrible facebookish would-be-social media style including even a Like button. Yech! The group also appeared in our already overcrowded folder pane in Outlook.

We all hate Facebook and don't want anything from that culture in our company. More in general, we only need email, calendar and all our documents shared to all users by default. Nothing else.

How can I create a new document library in C:\user&lt;username>&lt;companyname>\ without creating a group? I noticed that with the new sync client the name "SharePoint" is not used anymore in Windows Explorer. The icon also changed. But online it still has the SharePoint name and logo.

Is SharePoint still the way to go if you need all documents and folders shared company-wide? If so, how can I create new document libraries without creating groups?

Answer 1

Hi Willem,

From your description, I assume you just created a group site. In your situation, you don't need to do so, as you're using Office 365 Business Premium, you can create a site in SharePoint admin center:

go to Office 365 admin center> Admin centers > SharePoint > site collections > New > Private Site Collection.

Creating a site in SharePoint admin center will not create a group.

Regards,

James

Answer 2

Hi Willem,

Thanks for your sharing.

About the local synced path of the subsite, this is expected that the parent site name will not be added into the path. The path is always in this format: ...\company name&lt;site or subsite name-library name>\ no matter we sync a library in a parent site or a subsite.

Regards,

James

Answer 3

Later I learned that there is a simple way to make "Create new site" behave like it was before groups were invented. Go to Sharepoint Admin Center > Settings > scroll down to Site Creation and make this change:

and click OK at the bottom of that page.

I also found that creating a subsite of a teamsite does not create a group. A bit to my surprise, when you sync a subsites document library it appears as a separate tree of folders in C:\users&lt;user>&lt;company>\

I would expect it to appear one level deeper, under \teamsite - documents\ but it gets on the same level.

With the new OneDrive client the 5000 item limit is gone, so I guess this is another option to get a new document share.

Answer 4

Thank you, James. This seems to work. To my relief, after an hour or so, it showed up as a normal site, not as "site collection", when I click SharePoint from the Office 365 app launcher.

So we are able to keep working like we did, it only got more complicated. But that fits in a good Office 365 tradition. I'm pretty sure that there was no SharePoint Admin Center when we started about 2 years ago and creating sites was much easier. SharePoint is way, way too complicated for small companies and it is getting worse. We need something like Dropbox! OneDrive is much better than SharePoint but unfortunately you cannot set it to share everything bij default.

But thanks again.