Collaboration

Content

Research collaborations are part of the mission of UNL and support the core values of excellence, achievement, diversity of ideas, engagement, and research to foster discovery. It can be very rewarding when researchers connect with colleagues both within and outside the UNL system. These connections can require additional steps for responsible data sharing. The following are considerations that may apply to collaborating researchers:

Research Nebraska may be helpful in locating researchers and resources to support research in Nebraska.

Working with researchers and partners outside of the UNL/NU system can sometimes be a challenge when it comes to sharing files/documents and co-editing. The following are some tips for working with external partners.

Teams: As of January 2026, the most integrated way to work with collaborators that are outside the NU system is through Teams. Please note that creating a group in Teams creates a group on SharePoint, which will show up on your SharePoint home page. 

  • Setting up a new collaboration team
    1. Within the Teams app, click on Teams (likely the 3rd icon under the Teams logo). 
    2. In the upper right hand side of your screen you should see a button that says “Join or create team.” Click on the button and select “Create team.”
    3. There are three options: from template, from another team, and from group. If you want to set up a new team that is not a sub-group of another team or group, select from template. 
    4. There are four template options: 
      • Class: includes menu for home page, class notebook, classwork, assignments, grades, insights, reflect, as well as a general section, with posts and files. The menu sections are preset and cannot be renamed.
      • Professional Learning Community: includes tabs for posts, files, and plc notebook. The plc notebook is a structured section.
      • Staff: includes tabs for posts, files, staff notebook, and reflect. The staff notebook prompts you to create a OneNote file, and the reflect is a structured page with various brain breaks and reactions.
      • Other: the tabs are posts and files. 
    5. The post section is similar to social media, where you can share announcements, links, etc. and group members can react, comment, and reply under it. The files section is an interface like SharePoint/OneDrive (actually linked to your SharePoint home page), but you can edit and co-edit documents within Teams like you would in the browser (either in the app or browser). The files section includes room to add tabs, including existing pages (using URLs), Loops (including various template options), and/or apps. 
  • Adding people is easy – once in your team, you should see three dots to the right of your team name. Click on the dots, and you’ll get a menu for managing your team. You can add a member there, or you can select Manage team and see more options. 
    1. People you add who are at UNL will be labeled as a member, and external folks will be labeled as a guest. There is some customization of permissions for these roles (under Manage team> Settings), but there are fewer options for guests, and there aren’t different levels for guest – meaning you cannot provide different permissions for subsets of guests.
    2. In testing, guests from other institutions and organizations, as well as personal emails (and without Microsoft accounts), were able to access and download/upload files from a UNL Teams group. There was an issue with a guest from a medical school who was unable to access the site, but had issues with other external connections which they thought was due to their institution’s firewalls. 
    3. Principal Investigators (PIs) are ultimately the data stewards of their research data (EM41), and it is their responsibility to make sure access is appropriate, meets any contractual or regulatory requirements, and is kept current.
  • The maximum risk level for Teams is medium. Should you need collaborative space for higher risk data, please reach out to ITS
  • CAUTION: If you are the owner of a SharePoint site, and you make a team from that group, you will not be able to delete that group without deleting the contents of the prior established SharePoint site. You can hide it, if created in error or your needs change. If you accidentally delete the group and lose your SharePoint site, contact ITS immediately, and they should be able to restore it. 

OneDrive: You can add individual external guests to files/folders through manage access in the browser, or the share feature through the file explorer (right click on a file) or file tab of an Office suite program. There are some features that may be helpful if sharing this way:

  • External guests will not be able to sync the file(s) shared with them – they will need to save the link. Bookmarks are helpful for this. (Note, if they do not have a Microsoft account associated with the email the link was sent to, they will likely only be able to access the link once and it will need to be re-sent (as of January 2026))
  • You can specify the level of access you want a file/folder to have when sharing: edit, review (suggest but not make changes), view, and no download (view only). 
  • You can set an expiration date for the link. 
  • If you need to share something publicly, and you do not have the Anyone option under Link settings, contact your IT support. It is not available by default, but they can change the setting that allows it, which will apply to the entire site. (The tenant change removed this option for those that had it before.)

Holland Computing Center (HCC): HCC has both group accounts and mechanisms to share data stored in their systems if you have high performance computing projects. 

Additional Resources