SIMS .net and MS OneDrive

[DawnL]

Good morning

 

Has anyone experienced any issues with SIMS .net and MS OneDrive, in terms of My SIMS Documents?

 

Thanks in advance.

Dawn

[psydii]

We use OneDrive files on demand and have not seen any issues that I am aware of.

[DawnL]

Thanks for the reply.

Dawn

[Sylv3r]

Only in the early days of testing files on demand, but no reported SIMS issues that we have seen.

[AdamL]

No issues here either

[ifillingham]

When you say using sims.net and One Drive, what are you using one drive for?

 

Best wishes,

Ian

[ReverendJT]

Yes, there is a Capita known issue with OneDrive and 'SIMS My Documents'. Apparently only around 3 or 4 people have logged it so far.

 

If you redirect your My Documents folder etc to OneDrive rather than a network or local drive you will no longer be able to run reports. The reports issue is apparently because when you run a report it stores the base report in your 'SIMS My Documents' and also a macro to build the data within Excel, for example. However SIMS cannot reference the Macro from OneDrive and therefore fails. This happens whether the report is stored or created Ad-hoc.

 

Capita are aware of the issue and their initial response was that SIMS was built prior to OneDrive so we won't be implementing a fix and I should wait for their online version to come out. While I understand the response (not about their online version!) I would have thought they might want to create a fix with so many schools starting to think about OneDrive. They could have an .ini file to redirect 'SIMS My Documents' to a local drive.

 

I have escalated the issue within Capita however haven't heard anything since.

[psydii]

This doesn't seem to make sense. When you redirect 'Documents' to OneDrive, the folders are all in your local profile - its literally local to the machine and OD only gets involved to sync it to the cloud...

 

We do periodically see problems where SIMS has tripped itself up when files from a previous run are still hanging around in %temp% or My SIMS Documents. A quick purge of both always cures this (along with ensuring and orphaned winword.exe processes are terminated).

 

This has been happening since at least XP/2003 , but in the last few years very very rarely. Is it possible this is what you are seeing, and OD is innocent?

[mukz]

I don’t have this issue when redirecting documents to OneDrive, in fact none of our 200 staff have this issue.

 

Most of our issues are to do with temp folder as above

[ReverendJT]

I don't know whether you are using OneDrive folder redirection in a slightly different way, original way did use C:\Users to store the One Drive gubbins - I suppose you could still do that. The two latest versions of Windows (I think I'm right on that) allow set up in a slightly different way due to a new set of GPOs you can apply to One Drive which allow you to completely redirect to OneDrive and therefore the C: drive is no longer involved at all.

[woody]

Hi everyone. We are using the Onedrive Sync client and redirecting documents to Onedrive via GPO. Generally we haven't seen any issues with reports. The tempSimsRpt folder is created as normal and people are editing / creating reports with macros etc.

 

The only issue I have come up against is when outputting to a Form Report (RTF). If I try to edit an existing template on a report, or create a new one from scratch, word opens and then I get an error pop up from Microsoft Word as follows:

 

"Error 52: Bad file name or number"

 

Has anybody seen this? Our support partner (not Capita) has taken an initial look but doesn't have an answer as of yet. There is nothing on the Capita knowledge base apart from a community post, which is where I found the link to this thread. It may or may not be related to Onedrive but that sounds like the most likely culprit.

 

This is what Microsoft have to say about the error. https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/964585/error-52-bad-filename-or-number

Edited February 3, 2020 by woody

[DawnL]

Morning

 

Following up on this....

 

So, our network's been improved. This is the advice I've been given.

 

Our advice is please use Microsoft One Drive as your personal file store and create and save new documents in this space. When the Home Drives are restored and made available, you will be able to access documents in read only mode. This means that you can open and edit documents and should then save them in MS One Drive. You will not be able to save these documents back on the H: drive.

 

Subsequently, I'm trying to create an Analysis report but getting the message "\\[networklocation]\home\[myname]\documents\tempsimsRpt\[MyReport] is denied.

 

Any ideas how I can rectify this - how do I re-direct the location?

 

Thanks

Dawn

[MrMDStreet]

So, we have been experiencing the same issue with our users, having done a bit of research, I have found a quick and dirty solution (?)

 

I have one of my users testing at the moment but the gist is:

 

• Exclude 'tempSimsRpt' in onedrive app settings, ⚠ WARNING it will be deleted locally, if the directory has content you need you can just make a copy
  
• Open SIMS and run a report to recreate the folder.
   
  An error will prompt in OneDrive constantly but it can be ignored until a cleaner solution is available (apparently an ignore folder/file option is being investigated.
   
  All criticism, possible problems this may cause, or if it is just plain stupid response are welcome..
  

Edited June 25, 2020 by MrMDStreet

[DrCheese]

One onedrive on demand here and getting this - Annoying!

[ajp233]

Have experienced the Error 52: Bad file name or number when trying to create/edit RTF reports in SIMS. Changing OneDrive settings so that it does not sync the 'tempSimsRpt' folder sorted it.

[DrCheese]

ah, how are you excluding it? Using the example in reddit? Wary about causing the sync agent to complain...

[MrMDStreet]

Yeah, using the example. I was wary about it too but there haven’t been any complaints so far. Just might need to keep an eye on it just in case other stuff fails to sync. It’s a quick and dirty solution but it got people off my back.

[techy32]

We have just migrated to office 365 and using OneDrive as our personal drives for staff & students. We didn't redirect our personal network drive to OneDrive and getting an error message for mostly new staff with SIMS. I have made their personal drives & shared drives as Read Only. All of our new staff who has just joined are getting the SIMS error as below but they can access SIMS when I give them access to their personal drive on the network. My question is how do you redirect personal drive to OneDrive?

 

Edited September 5, 2020 by techy32

[techy32]

This doesn't seem to make sense. When you redirect 'Documents' to OneDrive, the folders are all in your local profile - its literally local to the machine and OD only gets involved to sync it to the cloud...

 

We do periodically see problems where SIMS has tripped itself up when files from a previous run are still hanging around in %temp% or My SIMS Documents. A quick purge of both always cures this (along with ensuring and orphaned winword.exe processes are terminated).

 

This has been happening since at least XP/2003 , but in the last few years very very rarely. Is it possible this is what you are seeing, and OD is innocent?

 

 

How do you redirect 'Documents' to OneDrive?

[aicrd]

Using Windows Known Folders: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/redirect-known-folders

[supportman]

I know this is probably annoying to most, but we moved away from Sims and we can now use Onedrive very easily with all staff

[maelortech]

I managed to fix this today. Could be somehting unique to us though.

We were getting "Access to My SIMS Documents" denied.

 

Tried many things but finally found the problem, in the registry.

 

The "Personal" user shell folder was pointed at a network share (something to do with a mapped drive, I suspect)

 

So I went to Computer\HKEY_USERS\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders and changed the "Personal" value to the proper "c:\users\\documents" folder. (Or onedrive redirected folder, if that's what you use

 

Like I said, could be unique to us, but might help you.