Using onedrive as student home folders

[unixman_again]

Does anyone use onedrive as the student home folder? We where having a brainstorm session and this was a suggestion. We in IT can see numerous advantages, the main one for us is that we would no longer have to worry about backups and students could have a much larger file quota than we can provide. It also means all of a students work would be accessible from home. Our students already have onedrive, and they get 1TB each, but most of the don't use it, or if they do, it is just for moving work from their home PC to the college network. Is there a way to implement this seamlessly, so that when a student saves a file to their homedir, it automatically get written to onedrive? Somehow we need to map onedrive in the same way as you map the student homedir from the file server.

[adamholt1]

Sounds a great idea, think would take a big script though especially to get the password syncro all aligned.

 

Let me know how you get on with this!

[hallb15]

Does anyone use onedrive as the student home folder? We where having a brainstorm session and this was a suggestion. We in IT can see numerous advantages, the main one for us is that we would no longer have to worry about backups and students could have a much larger file quota than we can provide. It also means all of a students work would be accessible from home. Our students already have onedrive, and they get 1TB each, but most of the don't use it, or if they do, it is just for moving work from their home PC to the college network. Is there a way to implement this seamlessly, so that when a student saves a file to their homedir, it automatically get written to onedrive? Somehow we need to map onedrive in the same way as you map the student homedir from the file server.

Wouldn't this be perfect! Unfortunately, Onedrive for business doesn't work that way as it syncs with a local folder, not the users home area. Its been discussed before here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/117148-skydrive-pro-syncing-folder-redirected-documents.html

[Quackers]

Would this not be painfully slow unless you had at least a 100 Megabit connection and the internet traffic was currently light. Can just imagine class of 30 all saving at the same time with big files, or what about large video files.

[PotNoodleTech]

Unless you've got a 1Gbit connection to the internet I can't really see it being workable?

[JRowley]

You can do it, I have tried linking my OneDrive as a network location as a test. It isn't too bad when navigating folder structures, but it struggles with basic things like making new folders, I really wouldn't recommend it. You would have problems with large files, be that working on them or saving them as you would need to download/upload them every time. Obviously as others have said you would need a very fast connection for this to be even remotely feasible.

 

The obviously solution would be to try and create a script to do a sync between a local file store and the OneDrive, but you will struggle a great deal with authentication I would imagine.

 

Edit: I should mention that in my brief test to map a OneDrive as a network location, in order to authenticate you must use Internet Explorer to login to O365 before you can access it, so not practical really. You could probably use powershell to get around it but I didn't pursue it.

Edited October 14, 2014 by JRowley

[pauljmiddleton]

I too am looking into this, it seems like a perfect solution to on site storage, in fact the cost savings in servers and cooling alone would probably pay for a bigger pipe, anyway, there is a powershell script I've been playing with which kind of works, sometimes, same problem as mentioned above though, it seems you need to be logged into the website before this script runs, which makes it fairly pointless. It may work with ADFS but I've not got that far yet. Have a play and let me know how you get on:

 

Office 365 Drive Mapping for Enterprise Desktops - Home

 

Paul

[jimbow]

You can do it, I have tried linking my OneDrive as a network location as a test. It isn't too bad when navigating folder structures, but it struggles with basic things like making new folders, I really wouldn't recommend it. You would have problems with large files, be that working on them or saving them as you would need to download/upload them every time. Obviously as others have said you would need a very fast connection for this to be even remotely feasible.

 

The obviously solution would be to try and create a script to do a sync between a local file store and the OneDrive, but you will struggle a great deal with authentication I would imagine.

 

Edit: I should mention that in my brief test to map a OneDrive as a network location, in order to authenticate you must use Internet Explorer to login to O365 before you can access it, so not practical really. You could probably use powershell to get around it but I didn't pursue it.

 

I would like to know how you did this please. Share your testing.

 

Thanks

 

JimBow

[JRowley]

First thing you will want to do is login to your personal onedrive through Internet Explorer, you must select 'Keep me Signed In' for this to work (despite this you must still access the web version for it to kick off authentication every session). Copy the address, it should be laid out in the following format:

 

https://-my.sharepoint.com/personal//Documents/Forms/All.aspx

 

Then start the "Add a Network Location" wizard from explorer. You will want to choose a custom network location, it will then ask you for an address which should be in the following format:

 

\\-my.sharepoint.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot\personal\\Documents

 

Worth noting that the email address has underscores in place of '@'s and '.'s.

 

All being well (and if the planets have aligned correctly) you can then name the network location and navigate it using explorer. If something isn't correct it will tell you that the folder isn't valid or that you don't have permission. This is as far as I got with it, I didn't get as far as powershell to try automating it mainly due to the IE limitation, though you may be able to get around that using powershell.

 

Overall the performance is what you would expect, slow and sluggish, workable if you are extremely patient I suppose.

Edited January 8, 2015 by JRowley

[gshaw]

Although there's various scripts that kludge together an implementation of OneDrive for Business via the Documents folder I wouldn't use it in a live environment tbh. Too clunky and the sign in errors mean you're going to get loads of user issues when things don't work as expected.

 

Personally would wait a bit longer for Windows 10 and see what happens with the updated sync engine that's being brought out at the same time so you've got something supported and (hopefully) reliable.

 

Also don't underestimate the amount of sync traffic you'll get, if you use a proxy \ filtering server make sure that's got enough grunt as well if you go for a larger Internet pipe.

[JRowley]

Yeah I really wouldn't recommend the method I investigated, it sort of works but that's as far as it goes, users would find it frustrating due to how sluggish it is. I was curious more than anything else when I tested it, as you say Windows 10 should improve on this so it's probably worth waiting and investigating it again at a later date.