OneDrive Use

[entyp66]

Hi

 

this is a very broad query. I was just interested to know how many people are using OneDrive in their school/college. We are just looking at using it now and are exploring the different options. I have setup OneDrive for business and configured it to sync to a local folder. However, in a school environment, this would not be ideal as the HDD would very quickly become full. I believe there is a way to map OneDrive for Business as well as Sharepoint locations to a drive letter. this would seen preferable as it avoids the local drive becoming full due to syncing. Has anyone got experience of this? Also, I've heard that the mapped drive connection loses connectivity if it is not refreshed periodically?

 

Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

Paul

[rob101]

We use IAMCLoud Drive mapper, when the students login, it pulls off the email address then they type there password in, and it maps the Students OneDrive. There is a little work to do in the background before this but its not to bad. If you have a federated service setup then it would log them in as well. We have been using it with Students for the last 6 months, Staff are about to use it once they return from half term and we have migrated there work.

 

Hope that helps.

 

We are not using it for Sharepoint yet but i cant see why this would be a problem either.

[entyp66]

We use IAMCLoud Drive mapper, when the students login, it pulls off the email address then they type there password in, and it maps the Students OneDrive. There is a little work to do in the background before this but its not to bad. If you have a federated service setup then it would log them in as well. We have been using it with Students for the last 6 months, Staff are about to use it once they return from half term and we have migrated there work.

 

Hope that helps.

 

We are not using it for Sharepoint yet but i cant see why this would be a problem either.

 

Thanks for that. Is this not very expensive?

[JoHimself]

I would avoid mapping these drives at all costs. I used to work for a university who thought they could save money on a new SAN by using the "free" One Drive storage.

 

Essentially the issue boils down to One Drive not being the same as network storage. You may be unable to meet user expectations with this, even on a university connection the speed of opening large files did not meet the expectations of the user.

 

As the mapping of One Drive in My Computer is not a supported configuration, updates from Microsoft may break functionality and you will have little recourse with support.

 

That being said One Drive is a good product with many uses in the education sector. Just make sure it is used in the way the vendor intended and you'll be fine.

 

Make sure you have a good solid AUP to prevent the little tykes putting all manner of stuff on there as a way of getting things on to the school network. Watch what the kids are doing as well.

[MrFrostmaul]

Same for IAM Cloud Drive mapper. We have the entire school on it with an ADFS setup and so far been working very well

 

We are using it for each users OneDrive and their our different SharePoint document libraries for shared areas.

[DavidYoung]

We have IAM Cloud Drive Mapper, and when it works it is great. We have had some problems with the serial key not being correct but that has mostly when we have been asking them to make changes.

 

It is pretty cheap per user but will seem pretty expensive overall.

 

We signed up when you could just buy the CDM product but found that they changed their pricing this year so that we could get the full SSO for the same amount. We tried to set this up last week but it caused a great deal of issues so had to undo it. We may try again further down the line.

[Patrick]

Need some tips on my idea for ipad pictures shared resource in my primary school:

 

*set up class ipad with o365/onedrive account

*on the file server, install the one drive app and login to said account

* map the folder to all staff

 

Doing this, i should be able to sync the photos from the (shared) iPads to the folder on the server that is mapped to staff?

[gshaw]

The thing I don't get about IAM Cloud Drive is if it works that well why didn't MS buy it up and build the functionality into the native product? So many people have complained at the useless sync client and the most common request is a "drive" feature. I did hear at another event that MS wanted to discontinue WebDAV at some point so that could be one reason perhaps.

 

What's the performance like using the drive mapper? Mapping via script never seemed particularly speedy and again have anecdotally heard that there's an upload \ download cap on file transfers.

 

At present we tell people to use the web UI and Office 2013 inegration. The new file management UI can't come soon enough in that regard.

Edited October 22, 2015 by gshaw

[CamelMan]

Just using onedrive for basic storage.

 

Check out TeacherDesktop for onedrive- it looks like it could add stuff to schools and colleges (not had the time to do it here yet).