Cloud Based Shared Drives

[Bobby_Moore]

Dear all,

 

Looking at utilising cloud to host some shared areas. We've done some research, but we want to know how it works in the real world. Both Microsoft and Google seem to be more tailored to personal devices and replicating shared drive content across shared machines is not really viable.

 

Has any one, for example, migrated their shared/common drive that all staff have access to? How did you achieve it? How do you present the data to users? Are syncing at server level and does this cause any issues?

 

Best wishes,

Edited February 5, 2016 by Bobby_Moore

[Mr_Jiminy]

Lots already posted about this on through out the form. Probably worth doing a search.

[Bobby_Moore]

Thanks.

 

I have found documentation online, but didn't find anything on here, pertinent to my question.

There are many tools to map cloud storage as a network drive (Cookie365, IAMCloud) but I have found this quite slow to navigate and I assume is not being used as a working directory?

Again, I haven't seen any discussions of centrally syncing data via the server and just providing a network share as normal. Is this a viable option?

Office365's answer for shared storage is Team Sites/Groups, what is Google's?

 

Best wishes,

Edited February 5, 2016 by Bobby_Moore

[Bobby_Moore]

Bump please.

[mowgli82]

@Bobby_Moore I am currently moving our Shared Areas to the Google Drive. I am using a program called Insync which monitors a folder which contains my Shared Areas and UserDirs. I have uploaded the areas to my admin account in google drive then shared them the relevant groups. I have GADS working so am using our AD groups to set the permissions.

 

Any changes made to our shared areas a synced to the cloud and vice versa. Google Drive clients seems to get hung up on system files etc.

[Paid_Peanuts]

@Bobby_Moore I am currently moving our Shared Areas to the Google Drive. I am using a program called Insync which monitors a folder which contains my Shared Areas and UserDirs. I have uploaded the areas to my admin account in google drive then shared them the relevant groups. I have GADS working so am using our AD groups to set the permissions.

 

Any changes made to our shared areas a synced to the cloud and vice versa. Google Drive clients seems to get hung up on system files etc.

 

 

How is this going? Do you have an update on how the sync went?

[gshaw]

Couple of quick questions for those doing sync to Google as their cloud storage method:

 

1. what kind of storage usage are you finding for home drives? Given that cloud is "unlimited" how will you tackle ever-increasing local cache requirements over time?
   
2. has sync been reliable thus far? If it breaks will it affect all users given that many are sharing out from a single account?
   
3. how quickly are changes replicated between cloud and local, i.e. will it always update in the time a user takes to move from, say a Chromebook to a Windows desktop?
   

We'd like to at the very least drop all our Documents shares for the next academic year, trialling iamcloud this week but wondering if the speed is going to be acceptable if it's basically the same method as the WebDAV scripts I've been trying so far.

[Paid_Peanuts]

I am currently investigating the use of online storage for students and staff.

However, during my testing it would appear that the upload speeds to Google Drive are horrendously slow. It takes upto 5 times longer to upload the same amount of content to Google Drive then it does to Microsoft OneDrive. We are talking about exactly the same files, a combination of documents, photos, videos of varying sizes.

The PC in question has a 1GB NIC and we have a 500MB sync. connection to the web. All connections go out through Smoothwall and all relevant Google URL's are in the do not inspect SSL category.

 

At the moment it is making Google Drive almost unusable as it is painfully slow.

Is anyone else able to do a comparison between the two? Upload the same content to both and time how long it takes for either service (Google Drive + OneDrive)?

[mthomas08]

I too am keeping an eye on this, sooner or later we will have to look at our storage solution. I'm open to cloud but it has to work, has to be as accessible as our current internal storage regarding permissions and most of all not take forever to upload/download data. Some Students especially Art/Film and some other depts. have large amount of storage requirements (like 1-5GB) and some Staff can have even more. When a file can be up to 1GB, I can't allow a Student to spend have the lesson downloading/uploading.

[Bobby_Moore]

Dear all,

 

Apologies for the delay. I suppose we are splitting this into three phases:

 

1) sync our ITSupport shared drive for testing

2) sync our common drive for testing

3) sync user homeshares (work in progress)

 

I think it is pretty common, with shared devices, the sync client is not viable. We trialed installing O365 and Google clients on the servers to provide shared drive access with the following requirements:

 

- Easily accessible/editable, especially on iOS (iPad deployment)

- Secure

- Fast to replicate

 

We found the O365 wasn't easy for the user to access shared files. You can do it in two ways, with sharepoint teamsites or with OneDrive and share the folder out.

 

Sharepoint

You create a teamsite which gives you a teamsite URL (which would have to be circulated and trained to staff) that you need to enter into the Office iOS suite of apps. If you want to open a file, you have to open the relavent app to open that file. A user has to change mindset from "where are my files i want to open" to "what type of file am i about to open, let me find that app". With the latest OneDrive client, you can sync the team sites files to your PC but on-mass, that won't work and generally thought, if I'm looking for files, I want to be in OneDrive.

 

OneDrive

Using OneDrive, a centralised account and sharing the folders in this way is much better. However, with iOS again you can view the files in read-only in the OneDrive iOS app under the 'shared with me'. You have to copy the file, and copy it back (making a duplicate) should you wish to edit it. For desktop users however, I found the online editing tools to be good and if we didn't have a large iPad deployment, this method would suffice.

 

Google

Again, creating a centralised account and sharing the content from there was great. We kept all documents in their native docx, xlsx formats but with the Google word processing tools on the iPad, users are able to view all the files on Google Drive, click on a file, which automatically authenticates you and opens sheets/docs, allows you to edit the document and when you click back, updates/saves the shared version, PERFECT! Even online drive allows you to open and edit files in Word 2016 and saves directly back to Google Drive. I have checked changes have replicated to the shared drive pretty much instantly and have not yet experienced any slowness...

 

Homeshares

With appdata, system files, media files I don't think we aim to host homeshares in the cloud but provide a network share to it. Cloud Drive Mapper - Enterprise Cloud Storage | IAM Cloud

 

Best wishes,

Edited February 17, 2016 by Bobby_Moore

[Bobby_Moore]

@mowgli82 The tool looks great, especially if you have multiple shared drives on one server or you want to granulate what you do/don't want to upload to cloud storage. Will definitely buy into it when we move forward, thank you Edited February 17, 2016 by Bobby_Moore

[Bobby_Moore]

We are using InSync and I am struggling with my plans to provide a half way house. We wanted to keep the shared drive in place and use InSync to sync any changes made locally or on the cloud Up/Down. InSync doesn't play nice with large storage shares and the sync times are too slow.

 

I guess the only way to do this is to migrate departments in phases to solely use GoogleDrive or not.

 

Is this consistent with what other people have found?

 

Best wishes,

Bobby

[mowgli82]

@Bobby_Moore I only synced 400GB with Insync - it took a while but now the initial sync has been done its fine. Apparently in the next version they are removing the 2 item upload limit.

What issues have you found with the sync times?

[jmak]

@Bobby_Moore: How does the pricing model work? If I want to sync one network share to a folder on Google Drive for which I am the owner, do I need to buy accounts from Insync for all users who'll access it, everyone who has an account on our GAFE domain or just me?

[Bobby_Moore]

@jmak you pay for just one licence per GAFE account you are syncing to. It's basically a more advance google drive client so it will enable you to have more than one GAFE account on one machine/server (if you have multiple shared areas on one server..)

 

Then it's just standard process to share the folder from Google Drive to the rest of your users.

[tj2419]

Can I revisit and bump this to hear from any schools that have working solutions what you have done / used? Or an update on the guys that have commented?

 

I would love to just offer our new year 7's a cloud hosted documents folder using google drive but map it in someway to them.

 

Cheers

[zag]

I really don't think the technology is ready for this yet. I've tried a few times in different ways but always failed to provide a reliable solution.

 

Ideally a student would log in using their office 365 account and have the their userdrive mapped to a drive letter without any intervention. Same for shares.

[Michael]

The issue in summary is that both Google and Microsoft provide huge amounts of storage, but the tools comparably are poor. Google (from reading other discussions) have the edge at the moment, but no doubt Microsoft (who I use) will soon catch up. There are third party tools for both Google/O365, but they're chargeable which defeats the objective. Free storage for Education, but we need to pay so we can access it properly. It just doesn't wash.

 

Certainly (in the short term), I've advised users they 'can' use OneDrive for Business if they want to, but we don't offer any real support towards it. Data will remain on local file servers, VPN access for all, but using the likes of local and Azure Backup for data. Backing up to cloud works and is reliable.

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Hi, full disclosure, I work for the company I'm about to recommend a product for, so feel free to take or leave my advice. We're sponsors over at the Edugeek Office forum and were Microsoft's 2015/16 Education Partner of the Year (worldwide) primarily because of this product. The tool is called Cloud Drive Mapper, and it turns your OneDrive for Business / SharePoint Online / Google Drive (pending imminently) storage to drives (e.g. L:\Lessons H:\Home S:\Shares you get the gist). Also works with SSO (either from ADFS or IAM Cloud's federation platform), so the user experience is slick like they'd experience with network storage. https://www.iamcloud.com/cloud-drive-mapper We do free trials, so feel free to give it a try before making any decisions.

[Michael]

Hi, full disclosure, I work for the company I'm about to recommend a product for, so feel free to take or leave my advice. We're sponsors over at the Edugeek Office forum and were Microsoft's 2015/16 Education Partner of the Year (worldwide) primarily because of this product. The tool is called Cloud Drive Mapper, and it turns your OneDrive for Business / SharePoint Online / Google Drive (pending imminently) storage to drives (e.g. L:\Lessons H:\Home S:\Shares you get the gist). Also works with SSO (either from ADFS or IAM Cloud's federation platform), so the user experience is slick like they'd experience with network storage. https://www.iamcloud.com/cloud-drive-mapper We do free trials, so feel free to give it a try before making any decisions.

 

Thanks Leon, but I hope you see our point of view; Office 365 is free to education so it's a bit of a kick in the teeth having to pay for something that Microsoft should have created in the first place!

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Thanks Leon, but I hope you see our point of view; Office 365 is free to education so it's a bit of a kick in the teeth having to pay for something that Microsoft should have created in the first place!

 

Ha, well, that's definitely understandable. However our developers need to eat so the small heavily discounted fee we charge to education seems fair from our POV too

[Michael]

The annual subscription (when you add up all users), is still quite substantial despite your educational discounts. We still need a server of some kind to host Active Directory and other services (on site). This is why it hasn't got the go ahead (as far as I'm concerned).

[IAMCloud_Leon]

The annual subscription (when you add up all users), is still quite substantial despite your educational discounts. We still need a server of some kind to host Active Directory and other services (on site). This is why it hasn't got the go ahead (as far as I'm concerned).

 

We provide volume discounts for organisations with large user counts on top of the education discount, might be worth a chat with our team if that's the barrier? We've not had any real issues with price before that I'm aware of. But sure, you may find having AD/DCs on-site has some ongoing benefits beyond storage. If you're wanting to go full-cloud and can get Windows 10 across all your machines, then you can Azure AD Join and we can tie our federation (and subsequent drive provisioning) into that too. So there are a few options possible.

[Michael]

Azure offers no Group Policy options - plus as I say, other services still need to be hosted locally - Safeguarding, Print Services, Door Systems - there's a whole list really.

 

What's the volume discount minimum required out of curiosity? 1000+ users?

[IAMCloud_Leon]

What's the volume discount minimum required out of curiosity? 1000+ users?

If you're looking at our whole IAM Cloud identity and access platform that does SSO/provisioning/password reset etc as well, then we're limited in the discounts we can provide at this kind of scale because we have to pay Microsoft a fairly handsome sum for the Azure compute/resources for hosting our platform, and because of the advanced 24/7 monitoring and technical support we provide as part of the service. However if you were just looking at the Cloud Drive Mapper tool in isolation, then it has very little running cost to us (except for our development, support & implementation teams) so we'd have more flexibility here. I'm not directly involved in the commercial side of things (and I wouldn't want to tread on our sales team's toes haha) but I'd say that we can certainly look at providing a sensible discount to organisations at ~1000 users in scale. We work closely with a lot of schools, colleges, trusts, universities of sizes from <100 to >500,000 users, so we try to be as fair and reasonable as we can around this. Feedback on the service and pricing is always welcome too.