Replacing Home Drives with cloud storage

[Shadow_Walker]

Has anyone actually fully replaced there on site home folders with cloud storage solution. Currently we have redirected document, downloads etc pointing back to our file servers and want to try and keep that seamless feel but with a cloud environment and wondering if anyone has found a way yet. We have mainly gone down the google drive route and file stream is used massively but can't see a way of redirecting documents etc.

[robyholmes]

With OneDrive on Office 365 it does offer a 'Redirect Personal Folders to OneDrive' in Group Policy. Not tested it yet as I'd like to move shared areas at the same time but I'm hoping its as simple as it appears.

[Shadow_Walker]

With OneDrive on Office 365 it does offer a 'Redirect Personal Folders to OneDrive' in Group Policy. Not tested it yet as I'd like to move shared areas at the same time but I'm hoping its as simple as it appears.

Thanks, i did read this article https://practical365.com/clients/onedrive/migrate-home-drives-to-onedrive-for-business/ but was hoping file stream would have some sort of ability to do this.

[ordeology]

We used the Sharepoint migration tool to migrate files to the various faculty MS teams we have. We made the mistake of asking staff to move stuff they need from their own home drives... so the next academy for this we will do all of the moving. We are also using Foldr to give staff easy access while we try and get all our windows 10 clients to the correct build then we will move to the one drive sync client. We will also roll out Office 365 pro plus as this links up with MS team share point libraries better.

 

I’ve been using sync client for quite a while and have the redirect setup so my desktop, documents etc are all redirected. It works pretty well. I also have the IT team share synced through this as well as do the rest of the IT team practise what you preach.

[AlanD]

Remember that sync’ing is not so useful for roaming clients such as teaching staff and students. For these clients you need oneDrive on demand turned on...and I think it will only work with more recent win10 builds. It still caches files locally as you use them...and of course opening and saving them is not nearly as quick as saving them to a local server....unless you have a gigabit internet connection...

[Shadow_Walker]

Remember that sync’ing is not so useful for roaming clients such as teaching staff and students. For these clients you need oneDrive on demand turned on...and I think it will only work with more recent win10 builds. It still caches files locally as you use them...and of course opening and saving them is not nearly as quick as saving them to a local server....unless you have a gigabit internet connection...

We have 1gb/1gb lines in all our secondaries or close to getting them in, all our primaries will be on minimum 100/100 as well by end of the year. We would be happy just to not give them a home folder and google file stream becomes where they have to save everything but can't see that working smoothly.

[TechMonkey]

We have. We use IAMCloud drive mapper to map a home drive and redirect home folders to OneDrive. We did use the Microsoft offering, including on demand, but we were finding more and more issues with it, especially with the roaming pupils and the syncing not happening in the millisecond between a pupil saving a document and logging off. Remember on demand still uses syncing, just only when you want a file.

 

The only issue we have found, so far, has been mailmerges do not work. It is a known issue, MS have yet to do anything about it, so we are thinking of creating a staff network folder that will be cleared every week that the files can be put in and used there.

[chaplic]

I've moved about 12k users (all personal use laptops) to onedrive, having previously had a redirected mydocs etc probably similar to you. Works well and with known folder move you don't even need to resort to the hand crafting scripts to do it as I did. Users of shared computers were left with personal file shares (version of windows too old for Files-on-demand)

 

i would certainly introduce it gently on shared computers and ensure office docs do their own sync. Let us know how you get on as I'm keen to remove file servers from my school too.