NC East - Sharepoint/OneDrive Sync

NC East Alliance uses Sharepoint as a central file sharing and collaboration tool for its employees. The Sharepoint is set up with a central hub, "NCE Department Hub", which has all of the "NCE"-prefixed Sharepoint sites attached to it:

• NCE Administration
• NCE Community Development
• NCE Economic Development
• NCE Finance
• NCE Grants
• NCE LH Talent
• NCE Management
• NCE Marketing
• NCE Public
• NCE Research
• NCE STEM East
• NCE Workforce Development

Add user to a Site

Site access is controlled by the automatically-created user groups associated with each site. Instead of navigating to each site and manually adding members, go to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and add users to a site's associated group.

If you have created a new site and want to add multiple users to it, you should add users via the Teams & Groups option.

If you have created a new user and want to add them to multiple sites, you should add that user to groups via the Users tab.

Both options are presented below.

Add users via Teams & Groups

For example, to add someone to the "NCE Administration" site:

1. Login to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center using the customer's Microsoft 365 tenant admin account (in Bitwarden)
2. Go to Teams & Groups --> Active Teams & Groups
3. Find the associated site group in the list -- in this case, NCEAdministration@nceast.org
4. Add the user on the Membership --> Members section

Add user via Users

Alternatively, you may add a single user to multiple groups simultaneously by doing so via the Users tab in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center:

1. Login to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center using the customer's Microsoft 365 tenant admin account (in Bitwarden)
2. Go to Users --> Active Users
3. Find the user in the list and click on them
4. On the Account tab, click "Manage groups" and add the user to all necessary groups

Creating a new site

If necessary, you may create a new site. The sites have been chosen by NC East to represent different departments. For this example, we will consider adding a "Sailing Department". To do so:

1. Navigate to the Sharepoint Admin Center, either directly at https://nceastalliance-admin.sharepoint.com or by logging into the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and clicking on "Sharepoint Admin"
2. Navigate to Sites --> Active sites
3. Click "+ Create"
4. Choose "Team site"
5. Use the "Standard team" template
6. Name the site according to their site naming convention, which is "NCE <Department>" -- in this case, "NCE Sailing"
7. Set the group owner to "UPCC Admin"
8. Change the Time Zone to Eastern Time
9. Create the site
10. While the site is creating, you will be given the option to add members directly - don't

After the site is created, a user group will be created and associated with the site, using the site's name/identifier. In this case, the new group is named "NCE Sailing" with a group email of "NCESailing@nceast.org". To add members, follow instructions in the "Add users via Teams & Groups" section above.

Add new site to the Hub menu

Before navigating away from the newly created site, copy the new site's web address to your clipboard. The address is listed in the Active Sites list, but will follow the format of https://nceastalliance.sharepoint.com/sites/NCE<Department> -- so in our case, https://nceastalliance.sharepoint.com/sites/NCESailing. You will need this in the next steps.

1. As a Sharepoint admin, navigate to the hub department site, which is "NCE Department Hub"
2. Find the hub menu near the top of the page (just below NC East's logo) and click "Edit"
3. By hovering your cursor just below the last entry in the Department list, you'll get a "+" icon, which you'll click on to create a new menu element
4. Paste the link into the Address field, and then set the Display name to the name of the department -- in our case, "Sailing"
5. Save the new entry
6. Verify that the new entry is indented in the list of entries (indicating that it is part of the Departments sub-menu). If it's not, click the 3 dots menu and "make sub link" to make it a part of the Departments sub-menu
7. Save the entry, and confirm that it shows in the Departments sub-menu

Add site to user's OneDrive sync

There are two ways to sync a Sharepoint site's document library to an individual's OneDrive on their computer:

1. Manually via instructing the user to login to the Sharepoint site online and click the Sync button
2. Automatically via Intune

Unfortunately, the automatic Intune option is only available with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and NC East does not have Business Premium at the time of writing. So we are forced to do the manual method.

Manually sync Sharepoint site document libraries to OneDrive

On the individual user's computer, make sure they are signed into their business OneDrive account in Windows and then:

1. Navigate to the Sharepoint site as that user (i.e. https://nceastalliance.sharepoint.com/sites/NCESailing to continue our example)
2. Click on "Documents"
3. Click "Sync", which may be hidden on the 3-dots menu. This is on the line with "+ New", "Upload", etc in the Documents tab
4. Your browser will prompt you to open the link in Microsoft OneDrive -- choose to "always allow" and continue
5. The OneDrive Windows app should begin syncing the document library for this site
6. Repeat this for each relevant site for this user

Customer-facing instructions

• Google Docs Link
• PDF Link

These instructions can be provided to an end user for self-configuration of their OneDrive.