Using Office 365 Skydrive to redirect My Documents

[bcsdtech]

IS this possible? - and if so - how?

[dezt]

I think it is, not too sure, but that is something i'll be looking at soon. If I find anything out i'll let you know.

[SYNACK]

I think so, you'll need sso turned on then you can map a drive right to their personal sharepoint pro web address. Not sure if this will work right in redirect or if you will need to add a drive map as an intermediary. It may still also prompt for sign in the first time.

 

There is also the matter of NTFS ownership, you may need to switch off the check to allow it to work if 365 does not present ownership information. I should be doing something simmilar shortly so hopefully will be able to test in a couple of weeks.

[Mr_Jiminy]

I chose not to do this, offering Office 2013 as an alternative, providing users with the ability to easily save the their SkyDrive areas.

[tj2419]

I'd be interested if anyone figures out how to do this.

[zag]

Its probably possible in some convoluted way but not practicle in real life.

 

I managed to map an old skydrive account years ago but it wasn't reliable and didn't scale at all.

[jbailey]

This may be of use:

 

On my home PC, I map a drive to a sky drive pro folder by using the WebDAV path:

 

\\mydefaultoffice365domain-my.sharepoint.com\DavWWWRoot\personal\user_yadda_yadda_yadda\Documents

 

This also works with %username%__yadda_yadda_yadda

 

This is on win 8.1, with dir synced account and stays active after adding site to trusted in IE and logging on at least once and ticking remember me.

 

I have yet to play with this on school win 7 computers - hopefully tomorrow...

[william_tropico]

We are 'also' looking at this. Setting up a test GPO and will be looking at this during half term. I will keep you updated with the results.

[gshaw]

I've done something vaguely similar with my Windows 7 machine, altered the Documents library to point to the C:\Users\username\SkyDrive Pro folder and removed all other locations. This assumes you have the SkyDrive Pro client installed and then in theory you push out the custom library.ms files (assume this would work with Win8 as well) and remove any other folder redirection policies.

 

The thing to watch out for at that point is that each user syncs the entire contents of their SkyDrive Pro to the local machine. On a shared device, especially with SSDs you can run out of room fast. Also note if you reset profiles after each logoff you'll be wiping the cache so in theory you'll get loads of sync traffic as each user has to download their library at each logon \ new machine.

 

Seems like unless you're using it with true 1:1 BYOD devices SkyDrive Pro still needs a bit of work to make it a truly usable solution on a network. Some elements of the consumer Win8.1 SkyDrive would help e.g. only show stubs of files then sync on demand rather than downloading the entire contents of SkyDrive Pro (e.g. does the user need all the files to get to one of them that could be the last one to be downloaded?)

Edited February 4, 2014 by gshaw

[oliphanj]

I was able to get our students Office 365 drive mapped using Group Policy Preferences. Here is our path... https://BLAH-my.sharepoint.com/personal/%username%_BLAH_org/Documents

There is one big gotcha.

If the folder mapping to work you must sign in and click "Keep me signed in". Then logoff, login and the mapping will work.

Thanks,

Jason

[zag]

I was able to get our students Office 365 drive mapped using Group Policy Preferences. Here is our path... https://BLAH-my.sharepoint.com/personal/%username%_BLAH_org/Documents

There is one big gotcha.

If the folder mapping to work you must sign in and click "Keep me signed in". Then logoff, login and the mapping will work.

Thanks,

Jason

 

Which makes it utterly useless

[oliphanj]

Yes, pretty much... I am planning on opening a case with MS Premier about this issue to see what they say.

[AWicher]

Any development? just got Office 365 AD FS SSO setup and looking to hopefully have a mapped drive/folder for each user.

[jamesbmarshall]

Not currently possible.

 

The desire to want a mapped drive to the cloud is something that comes up a lot - but remember that OneDrive for Business is not like a file share on a regular server, it's a part of SharePoint. The best way to interact with it in a shared device setting is via the browser, or natively through applications like the Office 2013 suite.

 

It's a different way of working - especially with 1TB of quota.

 

(I'm not saying that it wouldn't be super-convenient if it worked the old-school way though...)

[jbailey]

Found this the other day but not had time to play yet:

 

https://office365drivemap.codeplex.com/

 

Anyone had a look at this?

[gshaw]

Not currently possible.

 

The desire to want a mapped drive to the cloud is something that comes up a lot - but remember that OneDrive for Business is not like a file share on a regular server, it's a part of SharePoint. The best way to interact with it in a shared device setting is via the browser, or natively through applications like the Office 2013 suite.

 

It's a different way of working - especially with 1TB of quota.

 

(I'm not saying that it wouldn't be super-convenient if it worked the old-school way though...)

 

All very well in theory but once you step outside of Office 2013 the current methods for working with OneDrive for Business don't really work in an efficient way outside of 1:1 BYOD (even then the desktop client isn't 100% reliable)

 

Telling someone to save locally then manually upload via the web at the end of each session is too clunky and will likely lead to misplaced files and lost data. The desktop sync client could be a way forward but it needs to be more intelligent, as it stands it's a bit of a blunt instrument syncing everything or nothing whereas the consumer OneDrive in 8.1 is more flexible.

 

OneDrive for Business has great potential, I moved all my files onto it and the increased mobility is great but it just needs a bit more flexibility in places imo.

[jamesbmarshall]

All very well in theory but once you step outside of Office 2013 the current methods for working with OneDrive for Business don't really work in an efficient way outside of 1:1 BYOD (even then the desktop client isn't 100% reliable)

 

Yes - it's not optimal in that scenario right now, I'm pretty sure it'll get better as time moves on. It's quite a tough challenge to solve when you deconstruct it.

 

Up to 1TB of files in the cloud... all of which are fully accessible any time, on any shared device, without the hassle of having to fully sync, without suffering the potential bottlenecks of rural broadband or outages, whilst keeping full version history of the files, and sharing, collaboration and enterprise social features... I wouldn't want to have to solve it!

 

Right now I still think there's a place for a file server in schools. It won't always be that way, but right now I think it is.

 

Random longshot thought: a bunch of well connected schools, like an academy group, could club together for a StorSimple appliance to provide file storage to users without the burden of having to have a huge datacentre to host it. Spread the cost between the participant schools. They scale up cheaply with Azure storage, so get some of the cloud benefit (although none of the SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business/Yammer benefits), but also have all the native integration, drive mapping, etc. that you'd expect from a file server.

 

Depends on how important having that drive mapping is in the long-run... :/

[gshaw]

Depends on how important having that drive mapping is in the long-run... :/

 

Depends if MS can persuade third party app vendors to build native OneDrive for Business APIs into their programs

 

The consumer side feels like it's a generation in front right now, perhaps that's deliberate to use that market as a test bed then put the best bits into Office 365.

Edited August 4, 2014 by gshaw

[techie08]

Found this the other day but not had time to play yet:

 

https://office365drivemap.codeplex.com/

 

Anyone had a look at this?

 

Im looking at this now but struggling to get it to work. We are looking at moving student files to Office 365 so trying to keep a mapped drive without having to keep logging into the portal would be great. Don't want to use the onedrive for business client on windows as we don't want anything synced.

 

A mapped drive is also easier when saving work such as photoshop or other docs.

 

We also use folder redirection and not roaming profiles so even if the students click remember on the office 365 login page or map a drive themselves, it wont save the settings when using another PC.

[zag]

Im looking at this now but struggling to get it to work. We are looking at moving student files to Office 365 so trying to keep a mapped drive without having to keep logging into the portal would be great. Don't want to use the onedrive for business client on windows as we don't want anything synced.

 

A mapped drive is also easier when saving work such as photoshop or other docs.

 

We also use folder redirection and not roaming profiles so even if the students click remember on the office 365 login page or map a drive themselves, it wont save the settings when using another PC.

 

Give up now! it doesn't work from our testing. Always had to re-login no matter how many times we authenticated.

 

Shame really as the chromebooks + google drive work perfectly!

 

Microsoft have some catching up to do...

Edited December 1, 2014 by zag

[oliphanj]

Doesn't work well for us. I could get the Office365 codeplex script to work for staff but for students it never worked. MS needs to remove the Office365 re-authenication then it will work.

[ColinP]

Is there a simpler script to add a mapped drive without redirecting existing folders?

[Michael]

I've thought this for a long time now - Office 365 works great for e-mail, and as of late the web apps (Word, Excel, PDF) etc... work better, allowing you to preview directly, but SharePoint/OneDrive feels like a dodgy house extension - it doesn't 100% integrate well and flow with everything else.

 

It sounds great being offered large quotas of storage, but not being able to do basics such as drive mapping on a large scale... it's a design problem really. Being able to map to any cloud storage using Active Directory would be the way to go.

[psydii]

Most application writers assume Documents is on a local disk. SMB does its best to keep things sane, however webdav/http makes no such concession and is architected thus.

 

I suspect trying to use it for Windows home folders is akin to managing your mail through M:\ on an Exchange box. http://support.microsoft.com/KB/821836