One Drive For Business questions?

[mike86]

Hi All

 

We are looking at deploying one drive for business across our site, i've done some initial research on this but would like some advice from people that use this in the real world. What i'd like is for One drive to be automatically configured when a user logs on, the issue we have is that our staff use a lot of different PCs throughout the day & i'd like their one drive to be ready when they log in. Is this going to be a pain when using local profiles? We are also looking to eventually map the users home folder to one drive, i've seen that this can be done using some 3rd party software or a VB script, but if you have any advice, bugs, things to be aware of i'd appreciate it.

 

many thanks

 

Mike

[Joanne]

They will have to login to their O365 account each time they log in to a machine, unless you have single sign on... also I guess you won't want to use the OneDrive client, because it will sync everything to the local profile and if you have any shared computers, they will quickly fill up!

[Norphy]

I would strongly advise against using OneDrive for Business or any other cloud service as the user's primary home drive. Yes, you get a lot of storage from them but this comes with some pretty big problems. It's best to be used as a "usb stick in the sky" style of thing.

 

The biggest problem is that should your internet connection go down, everyone loses access to their stuff. In addition, anything like Photoshop which generates massive files will be very, very slow to work on.

 

If you want transparent authentication with Office 365, probably the best way of achieving that would be to put an ADFS Server in or use a service like IAMCloud from Federate 365. Each time the user goes to OneDrive or any other O365 component, they'll be logged on automatically on a school machine or be made to authenticate if they're outside of the organisation. This brings its own set of advantages and drawbacks so be sure to do your research before you make a decision.

[mike86]

Thanks Norphy. The problem i'm having is that when each user logs in they have to click the one drive icon & sign in, this also won't work until the user signs into the web version of onedrive (this is what i'd like to automate). I have ADFS set up so after this they are logged on automatically.

 

Joanne that was the thought I had, so maybe it would be a case of training the users to use the web portal.

[Joanne]

Yeah maybe set up desktop links to login.microsoftonline.com and then they can use the online version. I've found that people try and upload thousands of documents to it at a time and it fails. Also watch out for long folder names / structures. It doesn't like that.

[mike86]

Desktop link could work, i thought maybe mapping to another drive, might be a little easier for them & would stop the issues with clogging the HDD up using local profiles, i've tried the script from this thread

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/151134-onedrive-deployment.html

 

but had no luck.

[free780]

M$ really could do with having file stubs with the client. So the file only downloads when opened. Also true SSO. All we can do is submit feature requests.

[mike86]

What are you all using for shared files with in one drive, say we were to upload our "teachers shared drive" to the cloud, what would be the best way to give them access to this? Can we map a network drive to the cloud folder, so they don't notice a difference? Or is there another/better way of doing it?

[Norphy]

Again, I think it's a bad idea for the reasons I already mentioned.

 

If you must do it, a shared document library inside SharePoint Online is the "proper" way of doing it, ODFB is after all little more than a user's SharePoint MyDrive inside SharePoint Online.

 

Document libraries can be mapped as drive letters if need be.

[cpjitservices]

Yeah maybe set up desktop links to login.microsoftonline.com and then they can use the online version. I've found that people try and upload thousands of documents to it at a time and it fails. Also watch out for long folder names / structures. It doesn't like that.

 

I believe there is a limit set on One Drive for business... Max 2 GB file size. Users cannot sync a library (shared folders) with over 20,000 files and 2GB file size.

[mike86]

Again, I think it's a bad idea for the reasons I already mentioned.

 

If you must do it, a shared document library inside SharePoint Online is the "proper" way of doing it, ODFB is after all little more than a user's SharePoint MyDrive inside SharePoint Online.

 

Document libraries can be mapped as drive letters if need be.

 

Thanks

 

I'm trying to get it tested/write a report on this over the half term break so all the info is much appreciated. I haven't tested coping up shared file yet, is there anything i should be aware of, other than the file size restrictions? Are permissions on the folder structure retained?

Edited April 6, 2016 by mike86

[Joanne]

No, pretty sure you have to set them again. Luckily for me, Staff Shared is available to all staff, so no worries there.

[liveman2]

We used it at a company I worked for a while back. We had many problems with file sync issues (conflicts) and long path names.