Onedrive replacing homedrives.

[free780]

How are people using onedrive for business?

Has anywhere been able to stop using homedrives.

[snagrat]

We're pretty close to it.

 

We use IAMCloud to map network drives to our OneDrive and have moved all pupil and Shared Areas to Office 365

[Michael]

The main issue, is Microsoft just haven't got the manageability right, with some schools/businesses using third party applications, costing £xxx if not more, which kind of defeats the objective when O365 itself is free.

 

The OneDrive client is OK ish, but in terms of mapping directly, it relies on a cookie and is very troublesome, hence why a third party application is required.

 

Myself included have had a go with Powershell scripts, but it's still a nightmare in terms of manageability.

[CyberNerd]

We've pretty much ditched home drives for Google drives now.

If it's usable for Google then the MS integration should be simple.

[jcs808]

We've pretty much ditched home drives for Google drives now.

If it's usable for Google then the MS integration should be simple.

 

As an admin or teacher, can you view the files held in students Google drives?

[CyberNerd]

As an admin or teacher, can you view the files held in students Google drives?

 

of course.

[sted]

its probably workable on 1 to 1 pcs but i see it as being a non starter on shared machines as its a sync client so if you have 10gb of docs say (and i know of lots of teachers with many times that) it would try to dump that on every pc they used

[iamLeon]

Hey, I work for IAM Cloud, so this is obviously going to be biased. But this problem is precisely what we designed this tool for: Cloud Drive Mapper - Enterprise Cloud Storage | IAM Cloud It can map to SharePoint Online as well as OneDrive, so you can do team storage too if you have SharePoint. It's powered by identity classifications (e.g. group policies) and SSO, so it works exactly like a homedrive. E.g. on a network machine, person 1 logs in & has immediate access to all their storage (and possibly their team storage via SharePoint), they log off, person 2 logs in & has immediate access to their storage (and possibly their team storage via SP). Edited January 17, 2016 by elsiegee40

[Michael]

Hey, I work for IAM Cloud, so this is obviously going to be biased. But this problem is precisely what we designed this tool for: Cloud Drive Mapper - Enterprise Cloud Storage | IAM Cloud It can map to SharePoint Online as well as OneDrive, so you can do team storage too if you have SharePoint. It's powered by identity classifications (e.g. group policies) and SSO, so it works exactly like a homedrive. E.g. on a network machine, person 1 logs in & has immediate access to all their storage (and possibly their team storage via SharePoint), they log off, person 2 logs in & has immediate access to their storage (and possibly their team storage via SP). .

 

It sounds exactly what we require, but please see our point of view - O365 for Education is free, unless you optionally opt to buy into it (which is fine for some establishments).

 

Obviously the OneDrive client itself is free, but I agree with comments above, it's not suitable for a shared environment if end users have large home drives.

Edited January 17, 2016 by elsiegee40

[Michael]

Looking at the pricing (for a typical 300 users), at 6p per month each, comes to £18, multiplied by 12 months is £216 per year. Is that correct?

[quiet_andy]

From the site: minimum: £720 per year

[Michael]

From the site: minimum: £720 per year

 

I understood that as bulk discounts - so if you had 3000 users, it would be over £2K, so discounts would apply from £720+ upwards. It would simply be a case that they'd reduce it to 4p (for example), I'm speculating.

[snagrat]

They have changed their pricing but I believe now there is no bulk discounts. 72p per user per year is not expensive though.

[free780]

The thing I don't understand is Microsoft seem to want to offer Office 365 for staff and students for free. Its so tied to onedrive so would it not make sense for onedrive to function as a folder which lists your files. Doesn't sync down unless you need the fileor upload a new/changed one.

[iamLeon]

It sounds exactly what we require, but please see our point of view - O365 for Education is free, unless you optionally opt to buy into it (which is fine for some establishments).

 

Obviously the OneDrive client itself is free, but I agree with comments above, it's not suitable for a shared environment if end users have large home drives.

 

Hey Michael. I completely understand your point. The only thing I will say is that we've put a lot of time, effort and money into developing our technology. We're not as rich as Microsoft, so it's hard for us to give away our features for free. We try our best to keep our prices as reasonable as possible for education. Regarding the price, it is £720 minimum for our platform, but discounts can apply - especially if you're only using Cloud Drive Mapper without anything else on our platform. The reason we charge a minimum price is because we offer a full service - so you get a real person helping you out whenever you need it, and we handle all the maintenance / upgrades / monitoring and if something goes wrong the fixes too. So it's more than just an EXE.

[sted]

Hey Michael. I completely understand your point. The only thing I will say is that we've put a lot of time, effort and money into developing our technology. We're not as rich as Microsoft, so it's hard for us to give away our features for free. We try our best to keep our prices as reasonable as possible for education. Regarding the price, it is £720 minimum for our platform, but discounts can apply - especially if you're only using Cloud Drive Mapper without anything else on our platform. The reason we charge a minimum price is because we offer a full service - so you get a real person helping you out whenever you need it, and we handle all the maintenance / upgrades / monitoring and if something goes wrong the fixes too. So it's more than just an EXE.

 

i dont think anyone is saying you shouldn't charge for your work or its not worth it, its more a case of being annoyed that its needed as its something you would think ms would of baked into it in the first place

[jcollings]

We're pretty close to it.

 

We use IAMCloud to map network drives to our OneDrive and have moved all pupil and Shared Areas to Office 365

 

How are you doing your Shared Areas?

[Winner]

We have used a free tool to map OneDrive as a network drive. Give it a try here.

[jcs808]

of course.

Please tell me how you do this. Thanks

[CyberNerd]

Please tell me how you do this. Thanks

 

Basically, without writing a howto, you need to log into the admin console and create an admin role for your teachers. The admin role should only allow access to certain parts of the vault and nothing else. Provided your students are in a different ou you just delegate staff access to this. Provide them with a link and they have access (Read only) to the student area in Drive (technically It's probably a snapshot of it, but who's counting)

Edited January 14, 2016 by CyberNerd

[Achandler]

I'ver been looking into the possibility of doing this for my users to, except keeping a local file server and also syncing with OneDrive to create a hybrid file server, and remove the single point of failure (e.g. the leased line, and associated bits). Although i woudl rather not be paying for anything, I am going to try the shareware version of FAQs - Layer2 Cloud Connector for SharePoint 2010/2013 and Office 365

 

Then see if it actually works, as it seems to do what I want it to do.

[sted]

We're pretty close to it.

 

We use IAMCloud to map network drives to our OneDrive and have moved all pupil and Shared Areas to Office 365

 

was talking to iamcloud at bett yesterday and it looks like something we may be interested in. Just how simple is it so setup and run with. If it makes any difference at least in school i support (other techs use dirsync) when i add users to office 365 ive just dumped them in with a spreadsheet (or manually if its just 1 or 2 additions) and usernames on pc might be stafffb but office 365 more like [email protected]

[Hawes29]

I called at the Microsoft Stand today to speak with a Azure specialist to see if it was possible to sync network home drives, but they'd gone to meetings - this would be better if they could.

[ehg]

The main problem you will find with One drive in a domain environment is that if individuals are not assigned a PC of their own and wish to use the One drive application to sync you could be in a position where you have a large increase in your network traffic. If you are using roaming profiles then MS recommend not using the One drive app. I would go down the route of using the web interface only/sharepoint type setup. This way they can still access all of their files etc but only have to download those that they need.

[Achandler]

As stated earlier the piece fo software I intend to look at syncs from your file server to OneDrive (in theory, i haven't tested it yet) and as such in school people would be able to use the local file server but at home they could access files still.

 

I'm going to give the software a trial run in Feb half term.