Replace your on-site file storage with OneDrive for Business & SharePoint

[dhicks]

Regarding My Documents, there is a folder auto-forwarding function in registry that can achieve this for you. We've actually successfully achieved this in our test environments with Cloud Drive Mapper. It has a few caveats around its use though - as the first time it works, it actually does an auto-migration of the My Documents folder to OneDrive.

 

It might be worth investigating in a bit more detail - I'll email at some point.

 

At the moment we're working towards mapping to mounted drives, but wider than that it could well be possible. I think we'd probably need to do some more research first.

 

Macs turn out to be really easy - you just replace the user's Documents folder with a link to the place you want it to point to. We currently do this with a login script that redirects to a network drive, if you can mount a Google / Office 365 volume in the first place it should be quite easy.

[win]

Yes, we can, it's one of the options in the Cloud Drive Mapper config that you can enable auto provisioning of OneDrive as the user logs in for the first time. It's quite neat.

 

One issue with onedrive is that they can't use word/excel to save to onedrive on ios/android unless it is pre-provisioned. Does this mean they have to log into onedrive first or is there a way to provision it without asking them to log into it?

[snagrat]

One issue with onedrive is that they can't use word/excel to save to onedrive on ios/android unless it is pre-provisioned. Does this mean they have to log into onedrive first or is there a way to provision it without asking them to log into it?

 

You can provision with Powershell

[gshaw]

Hi, definitely not avoiding the question. Not sure anyone in the thread so far has asked it We've done most the development. Google Drive works in a fundamentally different way to Office 365 so it's had to be completely re-architected. There are a couple of final bugs we're fixing at the moment that we picked up in the test phase. It's a priority for us, so we have a dedicated team on it at the moment wrapping up the loose ends, so it shouldn't be longer than 4 weeks until it's ready for public launch.

 

@IAMCloud_Leon will the OneDrive API version be coming out the same time as has been promised for over a year now???

 

Also are you going to work on making the authentication work with other SSO providers? We're not using the SSO component of iamcloud yet (as we don't want to change from Azure AD Connect to iamcloud for user provisioning) and the CDM tool only works with your system and ADFS it seems.

Edited March 2, 2017 by gshaw

[gshaw]

Hi, definitely not avoiding the question. Not sure anyone in the thread so far has asked it We've done most the development. Google Drive works in a fundamentally different way to Office 365 so it's had to be completely re-architected. There are a couple of final bugs we're fixing at the moment that we picked up in the test phase. It's a priority for us, so we have a dedicated team on it at the moment wrapping up the loose ends, so it shouldn't be longer than 4 weeks until it's ready for public launch.

 

@IAMCloud_Leon will the OneDrive API version be coming out the same time as has been promised for over a year now???

 

Also are you going to work on making the authentication work with other SSO providers? We're not using the SSO component of iamcloud yet (as we don't want to change from Azure AD Connect to iamcloud for user provisioning) and the CDM tool only works with your system and ADFS it seems.

Edited March 2, 2017 by gshaw

[IAMCloud_Leon]

One issue with onedrive is that they can't use word/excel to save to onedrive on ios/android unless it is pre-provisioned. Does this mean they have to log into onedrive first or is there a way to provision it without asking them to log into it?

Hey - you can setup OneDrive for Business auto-provisioning in the SharePoint admin centre - instructions are here. Cheers

[IAMCloud_Leon]

One issue with onedrive is that they can't use word/excel to save to onedrive on ios/android unless it is pre-provisioned. Does this mean they have to log into onedrive first or is there a way to provision it without asking them to log into it?

Hey - you can setup OneDrive for Business auto-provisioning in the SharePoint admin centre - instructions are here. Cheers

[IAMCloud_Leon]

@IAMCloud_Leon will the OneDrive API version be coming out the same time as has been promised for over a year now??? Also are you going to work on making the authentication work with other SSO providers? We're not using the SSO component of iamcloud yet (as we don't want to change from Azure AD Connect to iamcloud for user provisioning) and the CDM tool only works with your system and ADFS it seems.

 

Initially we found GraphAPI didn't have all the functionality in it to be able to achieve what we needed, so it delayed things. It does now, so yes, we're working on this too. We're currently working on SSO via RM Unify as well, and we'll look at integrating with other SSO providers going forwards. Which SSO providers do you have in mind?

[IAMCloud_Leon]

@IAMCloud_Leon will the OneDrive API version be coming out the same time as has been promised for over a year now??? Also are you going to work on making the authentication work with other SSO providers? We're not using the SSO component of iamcloud yet (as we don't want to change from Azure AD Connect to iamcloud for user provisioning) and the CDM tool only works with your system and ADFS it seems.

 

Initially we found GraphAPI didn't have all the functionality in it to be able to achieve what we needed, so it delayed things. It does now, so yes, we're working on this too. We're currently working on SSO via RM Unify as well, and we'll look at integrating with other SSO providers going forwards. Which SSO providers do you have in mind?

[gshaw]

@IAMCloud_Leon we're on Centrify Identity Service at the moment but if you make it SAML \ WS-Fed compatible it should then work with any hosted SSO provider e.g. OneLogin, Okta etc.

[synaesthesia]

Does this work properly, without prompting, with mandatory profiles please?

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Does this work properly, without prompting, with mandatory profiles please?

Hey, yes we've seen Cloud Drive Mapper working fine on mandatory profiles, we're aware of at least 1 customer that uses it in this way. We also have a customer that uses Cloud Drive Mapper in a Citrix VDI environment. Recommend you giving it a (free) trial and seeing it working for yourself though.

[dhicks]

Google G-Suite version is complete, just finalising testing. Watch this space.

 

How does your product compare with Google's newly-announced Drive File Streaming?:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/181218-google-drive-file-stream.html

[IAMCloud_Leon]

How does your product compare with Google's newly-announced Drive File Streaming?:

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/181218-google-drive-file-stream.html

Cloud Drive Mapper is in effect an identity tool that uses drive mapping to integrate with storage, so it's all policy and rule driven in the back end. I don't think Google File Stream is - it's basically the same as Dropbox Infinite. Probably good in small businesses, more challenging in larger and more heterogenous environments. Will be good to see what it can do though.

[zag]

How does this work with non SSO organizations? Or what do we need to get it to work is maybe a better question

[IAMCloud_Leon]

How does this work with non SSO organizations? Or what do we need to get it to work is maybe a better question

Hey. If you want SSO, for a small increase in price you can take the whole IAM Cloud platform www.iamcloud.com which includes our federation/SSO service. So that's one option.

 

If you don't want SSO, then you can use Cloud Drive Mapper with the native authentication in Office 365. This just means that users have to enter their Office 365 credentials to map their drives. That said, if you're using Windows credential manager, then the users may only need to do this once, and then they're saved as part of the Windows profile. So the user doesn't have to re-enter their credentials each future time they login to that machine.

[gshaw]

Windows 10 1709 comes out October 17th and has OneDrive Files on Demand which is pretty much the magic bullet for cloud storage. Bring it on

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Windows 10 1709 comes out October 17th and has OneDrive Files on Demand which is pretty much the magic bullet for cloud storage. Bring it on

 

Depends on the admin control. So far it looks very user orientated, which is convenient for individuals - a bit like Dropbox Infinite - not for organisational use etc. Also reliant on pure Windows 10 infrastructure and Azure AD. So it's pretty restrictive. We're a few steps ahead with our next release ;-)

[gshaw]

That next release was rumoured last summer, is it finished it yet with the Google Drive support? Always sounded great but never saw a finished product before our renewal came up which was a shame.

[mb2k01]

Just to pick up on the thread title and claim of replacing file servers...

We're actually a CDM customer, initially happy to just have the solution for mapping to users individual OneDrive accounts. However, we trialled file server migration over the summer and ran in to multiple issues which your solution wasn't able to support / problems relating to SharePoint limitations such are URL length and thresholds which couldn't be overcome. So, the reality for us was that despite having your solution we certainly couldn't migrate file servers up to OneDrive / SharePoint.

I'd be interested to know if you think the above is correct or whether my guys queries with the support team might not have revealed enough info to make it work?

 

For a bit more explanation see here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/187304-file-server-office-365-sharepoint-azure.html

[IAMCloud_Leon]

That next release was rumoured last summer, is it finished it yet with the Google Drive support? Always sounded great but never saw a finished product before our renewal came up which was a shame.

When we were working on the Google compatibility we had a pretty big re-think about the whole thing. So we've now designed how it works... Took us a while unfortunately, but in the end it's much better because of it. Won't be long. I'll ping you when it's out, just so you can compare.

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Just to pick up on the thread title and claim of replacing file servers...

We're actually a CDM customer, initially happy to just have the solution for mapping to users individual OneDrive accounts. However, we trialled file server migration over the summer and ran in to multiple issues which your solution wasn't able to support / problems relating to SharePoint limitations such are URL length and thresholds which couldn't be overcome. So, the reality for us was that despite having your solution we certainly couldn't migrate file servers up to OneDrive / SharePoint.

I'd be interested to know if you think the above is correct or whether my guys queries with the support team might not have revealed enough info to make it work?

For a bit more explanation see here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/187304-file-server-office-365-sharepoint-azure.html

Interesting. It sounds like some of your challenges are with fundamental issues in SharePoint and the nature in which you migrated your files initially. Can I ask what tool/service you used for that? Normally you'd expect them to have some kind of process for handling filenames/paths that are too long etc.

 

As for corresponding compatibility challenges with CDM. It's possible that some of the limitations you're encountering re: url length are due to our CDM client's current use of Webdav, which isn't ideal really. Our new client coming soon is moving away from Webdav. So we'll have to give it a try when that's released and we might find that this particular issue is resolved.

[mb2k01]

Interesting. It sounds like some of your challenges are with fundamental issues in SharePoint and the nature in which you migrated your files initially. Can I ask what tool/service you used for that? Normally you'd expect them to have some kind of process for handling filenames/paths that are too long etc.

 

As for corresponding compatibility challenges with CDM. It's possible that some of the limitations you're encountering re: url length are due to our CDM client's current use of Webdav, which isn't ideal really. Our new client coming soon is moving away from Webdav. So we'll have to give it a try when that's released and we might find that this particular issue is resolved.

 

We used this for the file migration: OneDriveMapper | Liebensraum

 

I think you're correct on WebDav and SharePoint being the issues rather than specifically CDM. I guess the point is that technically, in our case at least, we weren't able to use CDM as a method to access local > cloud migrated file servers as the background technologies CDM uses prevented us in doing it. (Though to be fair, this was an attempt to migrate existing shared areas without doing any kind of housekeeping on them)

 

I'd be interested in trying out the new client when it is available, as this might allow users to migrate files themselves a bit more reliably?

[zag]

I'd also look at reducing filename size on the network shares before any migration. I do this regularly on our shares anyway to prevent issues with moving and backing up files with xcopy at a later date.