In this episode, Todd and David focus on SharePoint and OneDrive, addressing features that are often overlooked by RIAs. Implementing these features can enhance productivity, strengthen security, and save costs by leveraging more of what your Microsoft subscription includes.
These are some of the key points covered in the podcast:
SharePoint is like OneDrive on steroids
- SharePoint offers better security and permissions.
- Nothing should be saved on a local device and SharePoint makes this easier.
Real-Time Document Collaboration
- In SharePoint you can collaborate in real-time collaboration in apps like Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.
- Users don’t need to “check out” documents in SharePoint. Multiple users can collaborate simultaneously.
Secure Document Upload
- RIAs can use SharePoint for secure document uploads instead of third-party tools like Citrix ShareFile.
Secure File Sharing with Partners
- SharePoint offers an “external folder” feature for secure file sharing with external partners.
- Flexible sharing options in external folders let you assign view-only access, editing permissions, expiration dates, and password protection.
Versioning and File Archiving
- The version history feature in SharePoint allows users to revert to previous document versions.
- If set up properly, SharePoint has file archiving for SEC and FINRA compliance, with options for archiving periods and versions.
Listen To The Audio:
Read The Transcript:
Todd W. Darroca (00:22):
Hello and welcome to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. I’m Todd Darroca, and alongside me is David Kakish. And together we’re on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for RIAs just like yours. Now in this podcast, we’ll be your tech guides breaking down those often confusing tech topics into plain and practical terms because Lord knows I need it in plain practical terms as well. So it’s always great to have David Kakish here. Hi David. Good to see you.
David Kakish (00:54):
Hi, Todd. Want to welcome you and welcome to The Listener.
Todd W. Darroca (00:57):
Yeah, so we hope you join both David and I as we do these and we’ll dive into the latest tech trends. We’re going to share expert insights, and we’re going to help you navigate the ever-changing world of the RIA technology area. So let’s get dark, man. I’m already sloppy right now, David. It’s, it’s been a long, long day already and it’s only what, 10 o’clock? So let’s get started, David. So let’s talk about what we’re going to talk about in today’s session.
David Kakish (01:24):
Sure, yeah. Title of today’s session is Discover the Top Five Overlooked SharePoint and One Drive Features for Your RIAs. These are features that you are using, or I’m sorry, these are features that you’re probably paying for but you’re not using. And the really big problem that I see, we start working with a lot of RIAs. We see that they’re not using the full subscription from Microsoft, and I’m not going to talk about the full subscription from Microsoft. I’m just going to talk about SharePoint in OneDrive because there’s some really great features that your RIA can use that you’re probably not using. And to make matter worse, your RIA is probably paying for third party tools because you don’t know that these are already included or part of your SharePoint subscription. And I’m going to talk about the five most overlooked features for SharePoint and OneDrive.
(02:13):
And then what you can do with this is, hey, if you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person, great. Go do it yourself. Make these changes. If not, you can go to your IT provider and say, Hey, IT provider, Todd and David talked about these five things. We want to get that or reach out to us and we’re happy to help. I guess, Todd, I want to throw the question back at you. Why do you think it is that so many RIAs just don’t know about these amazing and wonderful features that are part of SharePoint and OneDrive?
Todd W. Darroca (02:45):
Well, if I ever put myself in their shoes, I mean, if I don’t need it in the moment, I’m probably not going to care about it. And even though if there’s something specific, unless I absolutely need it or something breaks, then I’ll care about trying to find it. Or also I just look at a product for the one thing I need to get the job done and don’t even look at the other pieces of it. So that’d be my thought.
David Kakish (03:08):
Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s kind of interesting. This I think, falls in that 80 20 rule, right? 20% of 80% of the time you’re using 20% of the features. And if you look at anything, there’s just so many features and they’re like, but hey, what are the core 20 things that we can use over and over and over again? And what I share is with real world experience, we bring on new clients and like, oh my goodness, we didn’t know that SharePoint and OneDrive could do this, this, this and that. So I’m going to talk about the top five things. Again, you already have this as SharePoint and OneDrive as part of your Microsoft subscription, but you’re not using these things. And as I said, you’re probably paying for third party applications. So I guess one of the things I will say is you can think of SharePoint as one thrive on steroids, and I’m going to talk about that a little bit. But Todd, I know you’re a little bit of a technologist. When I say SharePoint, what comes to mind?
Todd W. Darroca (04:10):
So it’s funny. It’s okay.
David Kakish (04:11):
Be honest.
Todd W. Darroca (04:11):
Oh man. I’ll tell you, it’s a pain. I think. Yeah, finally, it’s just a pain. It’s got a lot of hoops to go through, and then sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. For me, I mean, prime example there was, David and I obviously use SharePoint and share drives and all that, but there’s a little issue with just some multifactor authentication that was frustrating. I couldn’t get to a file. And that’s kind of been my experience with SharePoint over the years is it just seems like this behemoth of a very complex thing. So that’s kind of what I think of SharePoint. Yeah,
David Kakish (04:49):
And when I think of SharePoint, I think of the old SharePoint back in 10 plus years ago, the intranet, that was the big thing for companies internal where you could build an internal website and the intranet was the buzzword and use SharePoint for your intranet and stuff like that. So I’m going to talk a little bit about SharePoint. So you can think of SharePoint as OneDrive on steroids. I really wish Microsoft called it something different, not SharePoint, but they stuck with the naming of that. And that’s fine. Where I’m really going to focus on using SharePoint is as your file folder structure. And one of the, let’s just say the big advantages of Google’s, their equivalent of SharePoint is it’s very easy to share files and folders and things like that. That’s a big plus. The downside is it’s very easy to share that somebody that may not supposed to have access to that could probably easily have access to that.
(05:49):
And I think Microsoft for the RIA does a much better job of locking it down. And I realize that times it could be cumbersome, but generally speaking, Microsoft has really come a long way. And here’s the deal. If you’re using OneDrive, I strongly encourage you to look at SharePoint instead of OneDrive because SharePoint is OneDrive on steroids. OneDrive is great for an individual person for a really small business, but when we think about security groups and permissions, it gets really confusing and clunky with OneDrive. And on SharePoint, you get what I would call that enterprise security or that big business security. And the other really nice thing you can do with SharePoint is you don’t need to save anything local on your computer anymore. And what I mean by that is you can have everything inside SharePoint, and maybe I’ll talk a little about the drive. So the default setup that we do for our clients is each employee gets their own drive on SharePoint. And again, the really nice thing is it’s like File Explorer. And you know what, I’m going to share my screen here really quick. Let me do that so that people can see what I’m talking about.
Todd W. Darroca (06:57):
And those who are listening, we’ll make sure we’ll walk you through it as best we can. Yeah,
David Kakish (07:01):
Todd will translate that for me. So
Todd W. Darroca (07:05):
Sure will.
David Kakish (07:08):
Let me do this. Let me share the screen here really quick, and then we will do that,
Todd W. Darroca (07:14):
Should have some background music in there. So if you’re in the car, just think of your favorite background music as David
David Kakish (07:21):
Pulls us out. Alright, so these are my notes. Let me minimize out of that. So if you look here, this really is File Explorer and this is the file folder structure. These are locked all internally, and this is the external one.
Todd W. Darroca (07:36):
So for those listening, he’s got his share folder up and he’s got three different columns, and now he’s kind of scrolling down up each column going into one folder and looking at some subfolders here. So that’s nothing sexy yet. So that’s what we’re seeing.
David Kakish (07:50):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what I’m trying to communicate here is it’s really your file folder structure, and this is what people are familiar with. You click on File Explorer on your Windows computer. It also works on a Mac using Finder and things like that. And then you automatically are in that file folder structure and then you can access all that right there. And so what happens is with OneDrive, you don’t have the same enterprise security where you can create groups. And again, by default, and this is what we would recommend for you is you create one file, one folder for each employee. That would be Todd, David, Bob, Mary, so on. And that’s stuff that I’m working on. So it just goes in there, whatever Todd is working on, it goes in there. And then we create another drive. Let’s call that drive too. That’s for everybody in the company.
(08:36):
Everybody has access to that. Those are things that we’re going to share. And then the third one, the third folder or drive would be by department. So sales, marketing, finance, HR, and so on. And if I am part of the HR team, I’m going to see that If I’m not part of the HR team, I don’t even know that that exists. So at a very high level, you’re just creating three different things. A lot easier to do that when you’re doing it in SharePoint versus OneDrive. And you don’t have to worry about, what did I give Todd access to? Now all of a sudden you’re saying, okay, Todd is part of what groups, and then I’m just going to give access to Todd based on those groups. I don’t want to get too much in the weeds, but basically it’s really nice because now you can use big business security as opposed to consumer security. And that’s kind of a big deal for an RIA.
Todd W. Darroca (09:28):
That’s nice.
David Kakish (09:29):
Cool. And then we strongly tell people like, Hey, listen, you don’t have people save anything local on the computer because if they do, it’s going to get lost. Now, SharePoint gives you the ability in that file folder structure to just write, if you give employees permission to do that, to save it local on the computer so they can connect if they’re offline, if they’re in a cabin or bad internet connection or something like that, they can basically click and say, Hey, keep it on my computer so they can work. And then when they connect to the internet, they can sync up. But the really nice thing is you do not have to have anything that’s work related at all on that individual computer. It’s all saved inside of that file folder structure inside of SharePoint.
Todd W. Darroca (10:09):
So lemme ask you about storage on that. What’s your opinion on cold storage versus that whole cloud? Should I have an external hard drive on my desk here and I do a lot of things backup, and so let’s say, God forbid if the world ends and Google servers go down or whatever, should I have had something stored locally just in case or what’s your
David Kakish (10:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So okay. Yeah, lemme talk a little bit about that. So I’m going to talk in the SharePoint world, so the way that I operate today, the way that I work, and this is what we set up for all of our clients, and if you are using SharePoint that is available to you at no additional cost, what we do is everything is saved at the Microsoft data center in my tenant, in my company’s private network. And so if my computer crashes, no big deal, nothing’s saved local on my computer, if there is something on my computer, it’s a copy of what’s at the Microsoft data center, right? If I set up that setting and so my computer is lost, stolen, whatever, okay, no big deal. It’s secure, everything’s sitting at the Microsoft data center. I can pick up a MacBook, I can pick up another computer, register it to my company, and I can access that file folder structure. Now, in addition to that, we actually, for our own clients, we do two backups at the Microsoft data center. And so you can do that. Very few clients want to do it at a third party data center, but yes, that’s something that is available. But very, we would strongly encourage you if you’re using SharePoint to do another backup to another data center at Microsoft just so that you have that redundancy. But yes, if your laptop is lost or you have all that, okay,
Todd W. Darroca (11:55):
Yeah, thanks.
David Kakish (11:57):
Alright, cool. So Todd, does that answer your question? Oh
Todd W. Darroca (12:04):
Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah. Okay. It does. Now I feel less anxious about the world coming to an end and having some redundancy there.
David Kakish (12:11):
Exactly. Cool. Alright, so that’s the first feature is saying, Hey, use SharePoint instead of OneDrive because SharePoint is OneDrive on steroids. The second thing I want to talk about, not a lot of people know this, the Google world, people know that where you can have real time document collaboration, where two people can be in the same spreadsheet collaborating real time, and you can do the same thing with Microsoft Excel, word, PowerPoint and so on. You don’t have to check out a document and work on it in the old days. So Todd, you and me can be in the same spreadsheet collaborating real time. Let me do this and let me share my screen here really quick so people can see that.
Todd W. Darroca (12:49):
So again, those listening, yeah. Mr. Kakish is pulling up a,
David Kakish (12:53):
So if you look, I’ve got a document now. I’m on a different device. I’m actually on my iPad. This is me typing on my iPad, so if you look over here, I’m on my computer over here, down, I’m on my iPad so I could be collaborating real time. So Todd, David, and Mary, the three of us can be in the same document collaborating real time. Not a lot of people know that you can do this in the Microsoft world. That was kind of the big thing where I didn Google did really well.
Todd W. Darroca (13:23):
It kind looks like Google OneDrive and it is, I mean, I would say I do a lot of writing and other things on Microsoft Word and Excel. So this is actually pretty cool that you can do real-time collaboration. I honestly didn’t know that. Yeah,
David Kakish (13:39):
That’s the thing. Not a lot of people know about that. And then the other really nice thing since some here that I’ll show you is I can go ahead and I can click on version history. So I can go back and I can say, let me go back to November 15th and restore that document because I overwrote something, whatever it is, so I can restore it and then I can compare notes, I can do all that stuff. I don’t necessarily want to do it for the purposes of the demo, but it’s really nice because I don’t use this feature a lot, but I generally need it once every three, four months. I did five hours worth of work and I accidentally overwrote that. So it’s just a nice way to go back to that. By default for our clients, we actually do 500 revisions of a document. You could do the same thing on that. Again, no additional fee.
Todd W. Darroca (14:31):
Can you assign people or tag people to say at David, what do you think of this as you’re collaborating or
David Kakish (14:38):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The collaboration is really phenomenal. Again, people are sort of stuck in that old mode of what SharePoint and Word looks like. You have full collaboration, and let me say this, for the people that are actually using that, you can actually use the full-blown Excel application on your computer or you can use the Excel and you can still collaborate real time, either one.
Todd W. Darroca (15:09):
Awesome.
David Kakish (15:10):
Cool. Okay. Alright, Todd, any questions or anything you want me to clarify or are you good so far?
Todd W. Darroca (15:18):
I’m good so far. I think, again, this is really helpful for businesses, again, who are trying to, I get asked a lot by clients, which one should I use? SharePoint, Google Drive, whatever. And actually, honestly, I’m not trying to blow smoke here. That’s a new feature I didn’t know that SharePoint can do. Now if I’m not a SharePoint user, can I still collaborate? Can you invite me to without paying for some subscription fee to be able to access that to
David Kakish (15:49):
Collaborate? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you know, let me share my screen again. You’re kind of leading me to the next question. You probably didn’t know that, so let me share my screen here with you really quick. All right, so there’s two ways we can do a collaboration. So you know how sometimes people are using a Citrix share file or another tool to upload a secure document, click here because they want their client to upload a secure financial document or something like that. This is a feature of SharePoint. It’s really nice because it’s all integrated. You need a third party tool. So a lot of RIAs and financial advisors are using something like Citrix ShareFile or Dropbox or another application, and those are good tools. You’re just paying for something that you don’t need anymore. And so if you look here, a lot of our clients are using the app, that’s something it’s available to you. I know additional fee and the way that it works is if I were to click on this link right here and I’m your client and let’s, I don’t know, call me Adam Smith, I would come here, it would bring me in here and this would be branded under your own company, and then I can just upload a document. I would just come here and I would just select that document. Let me just choose a different document and let’s just call myself Adam Smith.
(17:09):
I upload that. That’s it. If I want to upload more, I can upload multiple files at once. What’s really nice now is I’m going to get an email within five minutes saying, Hey David, Adam Smith uploaded a document for you so I can go look at that, see what’s going on, and then drag it to that client folder.
Todd W. Darroca (17:30):
Nice. Yeah, it seemed pretty easy. Again, what David was showing is he had an email up and there’s a link to say, Hey, upload the secure document, click here. He clicks there easily goes to another screen that allows ’em to add somebody securely so they can see the document. And so it’s actually what three steps it looked like there pretty
David Kakish (17:53):
Quick. Yeah, you click on the link, you just click here to add more files, and so you choose the file and then you would just put in your name so that they know who uploaded that. Again, that is your own client. That is your own client that’s sending you a secure document.
Todd W. Darroca (18:12):
And I can easily take people off of a document if
David Kakish (18:15):
Let’s say. Yeah, I mean this is just, yeah, so let me just clarify something really quick. When I had this spreadsheet up, this is just collaborating real time. I shared this with you, we can collaborate real time. This right here is them sending me a financial statement, maybe like a W2 or something like that, that I need to get that. I want to make sure that Adam Smith is not sending that to me in a regular email from a security perspective. So I’m like, Hey, listen, send me your W2 or your financial statement or whatever, or a document that might include a social security. I don’t want you to send that to me via regular email. And so what the financial advisor or the RIA can send their client and say, Hey, to upload it, send that document to me here, you click here and then they just upload that document.
Todd W. Darroca (19:06):
Oh, real simple.
David Kakish (19:08):
Makes sense.
Todd W. Darroca (19:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, again, it’s kind of interesting. Again, I’ve been using Microsoft Word for 20 plus years, or Microsoft Office 20 plus years. I’ve never really seen it this contained. Everything seems like it’s in one place, so that’s
David Kakish (19:22):
Definitely, yeah, I mean, listen, to be fair, Todd, this wasn’t available 20 years ago.
Todd W. Darroca (19:27):
And let’s be fair, I was pretty young 20 years ago, right? I was a babe now.
David Kakish (19:34):
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And here’s the deal. Microsoft is constantly innovating. So a lot of these have been available in the last couple of years, but still people have that legacy view of Microsoft. Something else that’s really exciting that is available is, let’s just say you are a financial advisor, you’re an RIA, so David, we have an RIA. We’ve got 10 employees. We don’t do taxes, but we work a lot with Todd and Todd’s tax company. So we’re kind of a partner company where we have a lot of shared clients and we don’t want to send things back and forth all the time. What’s really nice about that is I can come in here, let me maximize that because sharing my screen and I can basically say, Hey, look, this is an external file folder right here. I’m going to right click on that and I’m going to go ahead and I want to share that with Todd.
(20:31):
I want to share this sub-folder with Todd, but I want to get really restricted. I can go and say, Hey, anybody with this link can access this. I can restrict it to specific people that work here, or specific people or people that I choose. I can also say, Hey, Todd can only view this. Todd can edit this. I’m going to put an expiration date, so Todd has availability for two weeks. I can set a password, I can block Todd from downloading that for the purpose of the demo. I’m going to keep it really simple. I’m going to say, Hey Todd, you know what? You can do everything. And this link is good for two weeks. And so I’ll just take this copy, this link. I can go back to the email and say, Hey Todd, here’s the link where you and I can access this.
(21:20):
So Todd, you actually have the ability to come in here now, and you can see these documents, you can upload, you can download, you can organize it, you can do all that stuff right there. And so where this is really nice is if you’ve got, because a lot of financial advisors and RIAs have, they work a lot with the same CPA firm or they work a lot with an attorney or maybe an insurance company or even maybe an investment firm or something like that. And so there’s just a lot of different scenarios. And again, you and I, Todd, we’re not sending emails back and forth with attachments or encrypted emails and stuff like that. It’s just a nice way to do that. And again, this is all fully integrated inside of SharePoint.
Todd W. Darroca (22:02):
And so let’s say I am, again, we’re partners, a lot of transfer of personal information data. Can I share the document to someone else? Maybe I’m not the right person to look at X, Y, and Z, but they are, can I share it from this easily or do I have to go do something special to get them added?
David Kakish (22:23):
You can share it easily. It depends on how we have it locked down. I don’t know if you noticed, but I had it locked down to say, Hey, look, if this is really sensitive, I only want Todd to see that in the scenario that I did right Now you can actually share that. So again, this is what we really like is because again, RIAs and financial advisors, some of the things they’re working with are very sensitive and they may not want it to be so easy, like, Hey, here’s a linko access that. On the flip side of that is they might say, Hey, here’s a link with all the forms. We can share that with anybody, so we don’t really care. So to answer your question, yes, you can do that, but also you have the flexibility where you can really lock it down. That’s where you look here, lemme come back over here so you can see that this is where in the settings I could really get very, very granular or not. Right? Okay.
Todd W. Darroca (23:19):
And so if I wanted to share it with one of my team members, let’s say I’m going on paternity leave or I’m going on for a while, can I give somebody, because I want to be able to share, there’s that knowledge base of transfer of knowledge base. Can I easily just say, Hey, from this frame to this frame, he or she gets access and then it expires once I get back?
David Kakish (23:40):
Yeah, you can do that. Yes. It gives you the flexibility to do that. Yeah, nice to answer your question. All the above. You can do it all the above, right? It just depends on how you have it locked down. Okay, nice. Cool. You didn’t know about, you did not know this, Todd, did you?
Todd W. Darroca (23:58):
I did not. I really didn’t. I think it’s, I ask about the whole knowledge base piece. Again, I know if we’re onboarding so many clients, there’s probably so many things that they need to onboard and learn. And I’ve had that experience where somebody goes on maternity or paternity leave and they just forgot to provide access or I don’t know where it is. So that’s pretty cool.
David Kakish (24:23):
Yeah. Nice. Well, listen, I am impressed that you did not know about that. I feel better because to us, this is just like second nature. How do people not know about this stuff? I guess this is part of what we’re doing and that’s why we’re talking is because these are very, very useful features. And again, they’re part of your subscription, you’re paying for it. And in many cases you’re paying for a third party tool because you don’t know that it’s already included as part of your subscription. And I would argue it’s a better tool and it’s a fully integrated tool. So for example, again, Citrix share file, it’s a phenomenal tool. It’s a really great tool and a lot of financial advisors and RIAs are using that. But the problem now is you feel like you have files in parallel. You have it inside of your SharePoint file explorer system, and then you also have it inside of the Citrix share file. And that’s just creates a conflict. You’re like, hang on, where is it? What did I do? And so on. And so this is nice because it’s fully integrated, and again, I know it’s a silly feature, but I love it when it says, Hey, Todd uploaded a document. I get an email within five minutes prompting me to say, Hey, go look at that. So I think it’s fantastic. Yeah.
Todd W. Darroca (25:38):
Alright, so David, help us wrap it up here. What are the key things that again, a person can do right after they listen to us or watch us?
David Kakish (25:45):
Yeah, so let me recap kind of the five things really quick because I jumped around a lot. So I’ll recap that and then I’d encourage you, if you’re listening to actually go do something about this because it will improve productivity, it’ll increase security and it’ll save you money. So number one, I talked about use SharePoint instead of OneDrive. SharePoint is OneDrive on steroids. The experience is very similar, but you get much better security groups and permissions. And I’d encourage you, encourage you not to have anything saved locally on the computer in the sense of something on the individual computer, have it all within SharePoint so that it’s backed up, so it’s also sitting at the data center and so on. And again, you could still work offline if that’s a requirement. So use SharePoint instead of OneDrive because SharePoint is OneDrive on steroids. Number two, real time document collaboration, David and Todd and Mary and Bob.
(26:37):
The four of us can be in the same spreadsheet, in the same word document, collaborating real time. We don’t need to check out a document. We can all collaborate real time. Number three, to upload a secure document, click here. You don’t need to use something like Citrix share file. You can go ahead and you can put that in your email signature and your clients can securely upload a document. Number four, secure file sharing with partners, and that’s labeled external. So Todd, I didn’t talk a lot about this, but all of the other documents are locked in where we cannot share that with the external world. We have a folder that says folder dash external. Now that one is something we can share with a CP, a firm with a law firm and so on. Number five is versioning, right? That’s where you can go in and say, oh my goodness, I worked on this and I overwrote something and I worked on it for four hours, and man, I lost all that, right?
(27:33):
So you can go back and say, Hey, I want to go back to last Wednesday at 4:00 PM and recover that document. And then to meet SEC and FINRA compliance, you can actually also do file archiving. What we do for our clients is seven years and 500 versions of that document and every single one of you, you can do that. Now, Todd, it’s a long way of answering your questions. Now that I’ve mentioned all these things that you can do with SharePoint, number one, go do it yourself. I encourage you to do it. It doesn’t cost you anything, right? You look at some of the stuff that we demoed and that’s cool, go do it yourself. However, I know most clients would probably not want to do that. So go to your IT partner and say, Hey, these are the five things we want. Set it up for us. Or number three, you can reach out to us and we’re happy to help.
Todd W. Darroca (28:25):
That’s right. Well, awesome. Thanks so much, David, for the quick wrap up and the next step. We hope that you guys do take those three actionable steps there. And hey, that’s it for this episode. So we want to thank you for listening to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by ria, a Workspace. For more podcasts and resources, go to www.riaworkspace.com and check out the learning center. And feel free to reach out to us with any questions or topics you’d like us to cover for the next podcast. We always love to hear from you guys out there, and we hope you guys stay tuned for more RIA Tech Insights in our next episode. So for David Kakish, I am Todd Darroca. Thanks so much for joining us.
David Kakish (29:06):
Thank you.