How are you mapping sharepoint as drives

[nicholab]

How are you mapping sharepoint as so it can be access through File explorer?

[thimon]

I haven't had much luck with this. I could get it mapped if a user has gone via OneDrive online and accessed the folder, otherwise a permissions error occurs. Still a work in progress.

 

There are third party tools that do this, however I'd rather do it all natively through Windows, if it's possible...

[mukz]

I have just spent the best part of 3 hours trying to do just this without spending money on a 3rd Party solution.

 

No luck so far

[free780]

Use 1709 use the sync client. Better performance.

[mukz]

Use 1709 use the sync client. Better performance.

 

I use it for OneDrive, its Sharepoint where i am having issues.

[thimon]

Same, Sharepoint folders don't show up when using the OnDrive client. Have found it also not very reliable for auto signing in via GPO, waiting to get my hands on 1803 to see if it's improved

[psydii]

Same, Sharepoint folders don't show up when using the OnDrive client. Have found it also not very reliable for auto signing in via GPO, waiting to get my hands on 1803 to see if it's improved

 

Not automatically, but if the user goes to the site and clicks on the sync button in the site document library, then it appears in File Explorer.

[psydii]

Which got me thinking (aka googling):

"If you want to auto-configure a SharePoint site to be synced, you can use the URL below as a guide to build the path to the SharePoint site you want to sync automatically. Replace HERE with the correct values for each component of the URL.

 

Note: Replace special characters like the period (.), hyphen (-), and at sign (@) with the corresponding encoded values. For example, if the URL includes a hyphen, replace the hyphen with its encoded value, %2D. Additionally, you will need Client Side Object Model (CSOM) knowledge to query the team site to determine the appropriate SiteID, WebID and ListID to build the appropriate URL.

 

odopen://sync/?siteId=SiteID_HERE&webId=WebID_HERE&listId=ListID_HERE&userEmail=UserEmail_HERE&webUrl=WebURL_HERE"

"

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/deploy-the-new-onedrive-sync-client-for-windows-3f3a511c-30c6-404a-98bf-76f95c519668

[thimon]

That's what I've got working(ish). But only after a user has visited the site through a web browser. Will have to look back at this issue, has been a while! Edited May 14, 2018 by thimon

[JackCPickup]

SharePoint Online?

Set this up for a client last week, isn't reliable enough for production. Ended up setting OneDrive up to sync them to a Team Site instead. Not what I wanted but it was a short notice job unfortunately

[psydii]

Ended up setting OneDrive up to sync them to a Team Site instead.

 

That is exactly how it is supposed to work.

[nicholab]

Which is rubbish for a shared environment? How does it replace share drive if the user has to do something does it work as part of UE-V to put the setting in there?

[psydii]

Go all in on a webbased future. You move people away from the File Explorer network drives paradigm to one where they use Hub Sites to navigate around to their documents.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Organize-your-intranet-with-SharePoint-hub-sites/ba-p/174081

 

or you use the "odopen://sync/?siteId=SiteID_HERE&webId=WebID_HERE&listId=ListID _HERE&userEmail=UserEmail_HERE&webUrl=WebURL_HER" trick automated using Group Policy Preferences.

[adamsund]

We've just moved each Curriculum area from our shared staff drive to Office 365 groups and replaced the files with a shortcut to sync the group. The shortcut is a little Visual Basic program that picks up the user's email address from AD and completes the link odopen://sync/?siteId=SiteID_HERE&webId=WebID_HERE&listId=ListID _HERE&userEmail=UserEmail_HERE&webUrl=WebURL_HERE" for each group. Seems to be working really well.

[nicholab]

What did you do with files that can't be save in sharepoint? Staff will still need to use file Explorer front end while we transition to share point. Also how did you do file permissions in your migration? Edited May 15, 2018 by nicholab

[psydii]

What did you do with files that can't be save in sharepoint?

such as?

[nicholab]

such as?

 

Ok I see that most stuff can now be save into sharepoint but certain legacy applications need a drive letter to save documents.

[JackCPickup]

That is exactly how it is supposed to work.

 

Correct. The instead is referencing the drive mapping from OP and beginning of my post.

[psydii]

Ok I see that most stuff can now be save into sharepoint but certain legacy applications need a drive letter to save documents.

 

I've been lucky enough to be able to purge legacy apps three times in the last fifteen years, so haven't had to deal with that yet. But I'd look at subst.exe to solve this problem.

 

 

@JackCPickup Ah I see, I miss-parsed your post.

[psydii]

Ok now I have fallen down the rabbit hole.

 

• Use AD Group filtered GPP options to use the odopen trick to put the sharepoint document libraries on disk
  
• Create an empt folder somewhere in the user profile.
  
• Use mklink to create soft links to the on disk copy of the various sharepoint document libraries
  
• Use subst to map a Drive letter to this folder.
  

 

 

 

Eg:

• You originally had t:\french department and t:\geography department folders.
  
• You have migrated each to their own Sharepoint Team Site.

Now

1. sync them to the client using OneDrive on demand username\myschool sharepoint\French Department and username\myschool sharepoint\Geography department
   
2. create a folder (using GPP) called username\virtual T Drive
   
3. use mklink to create links inside "virtual t drive" folder to the "username\myschool sharepoint\French Department"and "username\myschool sharepoint\Geography department" folders
   
4. use subst to map the "virtual t drive" to the T:
   

 

 

Now to the user and apps on that machine it appears nothing has changed!

 

 

There are quite a lot of moving parts here, so I really would recommend where possible changing user practice to use the OneDrive folders rather than pretending that the network drive still exists.

[Roberto]

We don't really. we've got some legacy groups/workflows where we might still do something custom for the users, and OneDrive Mapper can set a cookie for mapping the main sharepoint site while its setting up a drive letter for the user's onedrive and having this cookie pre-set by ODM gets around having to visit the site and log in to make drive mappings work.

 

But fundamentally the amount of work required to do this is vastly disproportionate to the benefit when the likes of MS Office and Acrobat can work natively with sharepoint online. We're trying hard to shift the "drive letter" mentality. It actually helps to point out to people that if they can get away from accessing documents on their ODfB or sharepoint online site via a drive letter and learn to do it natively from Office then they can keep the same workflow for finding the document whether working from home or on premises.

 

I'm not trying to pretend this is easy by the way, people who have spent a very long time working in one particular way will genuinely struggle to change, especially if there's no obvious benefit to them.

Edited May 16, 2018 by Roberto