Onedrive deployment

[mark100]

How is everyone using Onedrive in a school or college environment? we are currently holding out for a way to map a drive to onedrive, but at the moment its not on the roadmap for office 365.

How do your student store and access documents? do they have local storage as well as onedrives? and do they edit excursively within Office 365 online or download to use Office installed on their computers?

[Norphy]

There are various ways to map OFB drives to drive letters but they're somewhat hacky.

 

We still give our students local network drives and encourage them to store the primary copies of their work in that. We also suggest that they use OFB as a giant memory stick and that they archive old work off onto that.

 

We also use full fat office, the online apps are OK for quick edits but aren't powerful enough for more advanced stuff. Office 2013 integrates right into it so accessing documents from Office itself is really easy.

[danbuntu]

have you seen this:

 

https://office365drivemap.codeplex.com/

[mark100]

have you seen this:

 

https://office365drivemap.codeplex.com/

 

yes, haven't got it to work yet here, does anyone use it in a production?

[Asgard]

Iamcloud have something that does exactly this , it's cheap until you attempt to add your staff into it!

 

http://iamcloud.com/cloud-drive-mapper/

[mark100]

Iamcloud have something that does exactly this , it's cheap until you attempt to add your staff into it!

 

Cloud Drive Mapper - Enterprise Cloud Storage | IAM Cloud

 

That would be prefect, but just done the sums and your right, gets very expensive

[Asgard]

Shame isn't it. I asked them to reduce the price and it was about 20p per staff member cheaper

 

I couldn't gauge why they charge so much for staff compared to student ..... It's not like it's going anywhere different

 

#sadface

[maniac]

How is everyone using Onedrive in a school or college environment? we are currently holding out for a way to map a drive to onedrive, but at the moment its not on the roadmap for office 365.

How do your student store and access documents? do they have local storage as well as onedrives? and do they edit excursively within Office 365 online or download to use Office installed on their computers?

 

We have onedrive as an addition to their normal network home area, and we are slowly encouraging students to make use of it. We only adopted it this year and it is slowly starting to take shape. I have a combination of a VBS script and a batch file which I cobbled together that maps their OneDrive as Z:\ on the PC's and allows them to easily move work between the two locations. It is 80% successful at actually mapping the drive.

 

That powershell script however actually looks over-complex as it deals with the scenario of the drive not mapping and providing a temporary area for storage which in my opinion is a little OTT for the way we use it. I've just stripped out most of it and it does actually seem to work so I might trial that as a replacement for my existing script.

 

I don't think you can ever really replace their network home areas with onedrive completely, as there are always going to be students working with large files that will need a local network area, and also if there are issues with the one drive services which occasionally there are, you end up completely scuppered. We are promoting it to students as a way of moving documents from home to school and working with documents on their iPads as oppose to pushing it as the main area to store their work for the moment.

[Asgard]

Any chance of sharing your script hahahah . Had to try ;-)

[maniac]

Of course, why wouldn't I - however the powershell script on the link above is better.

 

There's two parts to it - the first is a VB script that I run as a login script.

 

'Wait for login to complete

WScript.Sleep 6000

 

Set objExplorer = WScript.CreateObject ("InternetExplorer.Application", "IE_")

objExplorer.Navigate "http://onedrive.schoolname.com"

 

'Determines if the window is visible or not

objExplorer.Visible = 0

 

'Suspend the script for 30 seconds

WScript.Sleep 6000

 

Set wshShell = WScript.CreateObject( "WScript.Shell" )

Set wshSystemEnv = wshShell.Environment( "User" )

 

strUserName = wshShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings( "%USERNAME%" )

 

'replace fullstops in usernames with underscores

strUserName=(Replace(strUserName,".","_"))

 

strRemotePath="https://youroffice365tennent.com/personal/" & strUserName & "_youroffice365tennent_com/Documents"

 

'Place onedrive path in environment variable for batch file to read

wshSystemEnv("OneDrivePath") = strRemotePath

 

'run batch file to map drive

wshshell.Run "%comspec% /K \\networklocation\onedrive.bat", 0, True

 

'Close the IE (instantiated) window

 

objExplorer.quit

 

What this does is open an invisible IE window and visits my onedrive smartlink which using SSO authenticates my users to the office 365 platform as they need to be logged into office 365 before they can map a drive letter to it! The second part is it retrieves the username from the logged on user details and constructs the correct URL to map the drive to, then stores that in an environment variable ready for the batch file to read.

 

The second is a simple batch file that maps the drive. The reason the drive is mapped with a batch file is simply because for some reason you can't map drives to a web location in a VB script, or at least I can't find a way of making it work, it just errors when I try, but works like a charm with the batch file.

 

net use Z: /DELETE

net use Z: %onedrivepath%

 

This works 80% of the time for us, I've never worked out why it doesn't work 100% of the time, but in case it doesn't there's also a shortcut on the desktop for students and staff which launches this script manually.

 

Please note the URL https://onedrive.schoolname.com (where school name is replaced with my website URL) is an Office 365 smartlink redirect that I've setup on my TMG server which automatically logs in my users using SSO via ADFS. From outside the Academy visiting that URL takes them to my ADFS login page and then into their onedrive from there. Smartlinks are great actually as you can direct them at specific services which is dead handy, so for example visiting staff.schoolname.com takes people to our staff portal page in SharePoint online.

 

Mike.

Edited March 18, 2015 by maniac

[Asgard]

You sir are a legend.

 

Dispite all the kick offs on here over the last 24hrs it's nice to see a bit of cooperation

 

We have https://office365.bsfc.ac.uk and the now redundant skydrive. (Which I disabled) , so I'll Resurect that tonight

[maniac]

You sir are a legend.

 

Dispite all the kick offs on here over the last 24hrs it's nice to see a bit of cooperation

 

We have https://office365.bsfc.ac.uk and the now redundant skydrive. (Which I disabled) , so I'll Resurect that tonight

 

What goes around comes around.

 

If you happen to know how I can inject custom CSS script into a sharepoint site, then please let me know! http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/151214-office-365-custom-css-code.html

 

Mike.

[GavinR]

Good afternoon,

 

I can see the above threads in regards the Cloud Drive Mapper.

 

It would be great to find out the context in which you feel that the pricing is high with the product and what are you comparing the pricing against.

 

#preferhappyfaces

[maniac]

You sir are a legend.

 

Dispite all the kick offs on here over the last 24hrs it's nice to see a bit of cooperation

 

We have https://office365.bsfc.ac.uk and the now redundant skydrive. (Which I disabled) , so I'll Resurect that tonight

 

I love the way we've both picked a photo of part of our building for the ADFS sign in page. Mine is https://onedrive.spiresacademy.com lol

[Asgard]

Good afternoon,

 

I can see the above threads in regards the Cloud Drive Mapper.

 

It would be great to find out the context in which you feel that the pricing is high with the product and what are you comparing the pricing against.

 

#preferhappyfaces

 

Hi

 

From my point of view I could not justify paying for it when the staff pricing was significantly more expensive compared to a student. The pricing was ok until I had to account for staff.

 

Especially as it all goes pretty much to the same place.

Edited March 18, 2015 by Asgard

[Asgard]

I love the way we've both picked a photo of part of our building for the ADFS sign in page. Mine is https://onedrive.spiresacademy.com lol

 

That how cool kids roll ;-)

[Wubbalubbadub]

That would be prefect, but just done the sums and your right, gets very expensive

 

Which plan would you need? I'm getting a bit confused... the education pricing seems really good!?

[Wubbalubbadub]

That how cool kids roll ;-)

 

Have you guys paid for azure premium to get the personalised sign in page?

[Asgard]

Have you guys paid for azure premium to get the personalised sign in page?

 

 

No it's an on premise ADFS3 box

Edited March 18, 2015 by Asgard

[Asgard]

Which plan would you need? I'm getting a bit confused... the education pricing seems really good!?

 

To license 250 staff is as expensive to license 1400 students.

 

Using the Identity+ pricing.

[mark100]

Awesome @maniac thank you for the script.

[maniac]

Awesome @maniac thank you for the script.

 

Let me know if it works for you, as I say it's not 100% reliable here for various reasons, but it works well enough in the absence of an official solution for this.

 

Mike.

[chrisjako]

Can you not just map a network drive using GPP to the location with the %username% variable?

[maniac]

Can you not just map a network drive using GPP to the location with the %username% variable?

 

This doesn't work, reasons for us are two fold.

 

Firstly our teacher usernames have a "." in them and office 365 transfers these into a "_" for onedrive access so the %username% variable is no good.

 

Secondly the user has to be authenticated to office 365 before the drive mapping will be successful, that's why my script opens internet explorer and visits the one drive site first which on my system does a SSO via ADFS to authenticate the user to office 365 before mapping the drive.

Edited March 27, 2015 by maniac

[zag]

I wonder if creating a shortcut to "Map Skydrive" on their desktops would work?

 

Any ideas what i'm doing wrong?

 

Edited March 27, 2015 by zag