One Drive - What do you do?

[EvLPhenom]

Morning all, I am after a little bit of insight into how you do things and what you push from a tech point of view with the use of Office 365 and in particular One Drive.

 

We are being pushed by SLT to start getting users using it more but I keep getting the usual “I don’t like it”/”we have the shared area” etc etc from staff. I have put a couple of test groups together where a couple of departments use One Drive but looking at putting our entire Shared Area in the cloud seems a bit daunting.

 

Even if I was to do this how can I make it as simple as possible for staff to use this drive? How can I map a drive to it/can i even do this? Can I still make certain folders view only/deny access to certain groups etc?

 

If there is anyone in the Birmingham area who has implemented this it would be good to see this in a working environment if we can arrange it.

 

Thanks in advance

Andy

[FN-GM]

I think you need to go back to basics and ask why your users don't want to use it and what they don't like. Once you know then look at fixing it. Maybe OneDrive isn't right for your environment - it wasn't for us so we switched to Google Drive instead. The uptake is now much better.

 

Shoehorning it in and trying to force staff to use it will not work.

Edited April 12, 2019 by FN-GM

[ColonelPanic]

Hi Andy,

 

We have a desktop shortcut to Office 365 that we encourage all members of staff to use (to access OneDrive).

Our teaching staff have started using it to store personalised lesson resources (the kind of stuff they used to carry around on USB sticks), there's a small handful that have migrated their entire shared drive there too.

 

We have a Sharepoint (O365) site that is set up for the different teaching departments. Every department has it's own shared file library, and only members from that departments' AD group can write files to it, everybody else (including students) can read the files, as it's set up for classroom resources, worksheets, old exam papers, things like that.

 

The primary push we made was being able to access the files and edit them from home. The biggest inhibitor we have is that the majority of our lesson resources are Smart Notebook files (they'll be the death of me), and there's obviously no way of editing these in Office 365.

 

We have looked at mapping OneDrive/Sharepoint but until we can get SSO working effectively/reliably, it'll have to wait I think. We couldn't install the OD desktop client either without it wanting to sync the entire contents to the local profile, I'm sure there's a way of fixing this, but we haven't looked at it yet.

 

Our shared drives aren't going away any time soon.

 

Thanks,

CP

[FN-GM]

Just had a thought. Do you have Single Sign On setup? I wonder if users just don't want to keep logging in to 365.

[free780]

You can also go down the Teams route. A SharePoint Teams site is setup per team with a document library. You supposed to use the onedrive sync client and connect the team site for files such as Smart Notebook. The per machine Onedrive client is out of preview (I believe). Mapped drives use webdav which is slow.

[strawberry]

Sounds like a users vs SLT issue. Get them to sit down and discuss.

[FishCustard]

Why do SLT want staff using OneDrive? If the standard network drives work, allow staff to do their jobs, and don't cause any problems, then I'm with the users. It's a solution looking for a problem.

 

If there's a genuine issue (e.g. old servers that need replacing, no money to replace, so the school wants to go with 365) then a plan needs to be devised. But SLT pushing cloud for cloud's sake will always fail IMO.

[free780]

Yep. However if an organisation has chosen Office 365 staff should use it. Otherwise you run the risk of shadow IT and data leakage using personal accounts. In business you wouldn't get the "I don't like it" argument.

 

There's also the coauthoring that is possible with SharePoint online which you can't do with mapped drives.

Edited April 12, 2019 by free780

[FishCustard]

Yep. However if an organisation has chosen Office 365 staff should use it. Otherwise you run the risk of shadow IT and data leakage using personal accounts. In business you wouldn't get the "I don't like it" argument.

 

I would hope that if the school has made the executive decision to move to 365 for storage, then a full transition plan would have been devised and the shared drives would be being phased out. In which case, yes, staff should follow the policies.

 

Of course, I may be assuming too much planning and competence...

[TechMonkey]

We had a migration plan and did it bit by bit. So first you need to make sure staff are clear what is what. We did OneDrive first, explained that it is for their documents and short term collaboration. Looks like you need staff to break any link they have between their work area nad shared areas. We did this by saying OneDrive is One's drive. We spent about 9 months+ informing staff of the benefits, letting them know the timeline, demos on INSET days, repeated emails telling them what they had to do by when and lots of one on one opportunities. When we eventually chopped over to OneDrive we only had 3 people who forgot to do what they were told, so I count that as a win.

 

You also have to make sure it is as easy as possible to use, so auto login (SSO), mapped drives etc.

 

Now we are looking at shared areas as a separate project that will be a year long to ensure staff can get their documents. So we will lock the shared area near the beginning of the holidays, and it will sit there as a read only source that people can access to copy documents over. On pain of death they are not to just bulk copy everything over. Once the year has passed the old shared area will be archived and mapped drives will disappear. Again, we are trying to make it as easy as possible, we have mapped drives mimicking what they currently have. People are all ready using it, so there is slight confusion over where some things are but that is don to ensuring communication is clear.

 

This is all done in consultation with SLT and sign of with them.

 

People will complain about change, you just have to manage it and give them every opportunity you can, but at some point the old has to be cut off.

 

As for mapping, with OneDrive you can make the Library folders redirect so you could just make it so there is no mapped drive anymore. You can script it or we bought IAMCloud Drive mapper.

 

I would take it slow and try to take people along with you, not drag them kicking and screaming, although there will always be some!

 

Entire shared area is easy, it is just a long copy and paste job. OneDrive is the tricky one and needs a lot of testing and evaluating.

 

Teams is then a whole different ball game and where we would like to ultimate move to, but baby steps.

[synaesthesia]

We're using onedrivemapper with good success; it fails a couple of times for no apparent reason, but this way staff are basically unaware they're using onedrive (well they are as it doesnt replace their homedrive) but it acts like any other storage device. I hope/plan to migrate over to the new onedrive client when it's ready for per-machine use to simplify this even further.

[ColonelPanic]

Just had a thought. Do you have Single Sign On setup? I wonder if users just don't want to keep logging in to 365.

Yes, we have SSO working with the web apps, but when we tried mapping Sharepoint as a network drive, it prompted for credentials.

[EvLPhenom]

Thanks for all the replies, some food for thought. I will sit down and plan what we are actually wanting from the project and where we are to where we want to be.

 

I know one of the main issues is that staff don't like signing in, SSO is being worked on at the moment to combat this. Another is plain and simple - they don't like change and from one teachers mouth "Can't be bothered with it" (this was when he asked for a spare USB and i showed him how to access one drive).

 

Thanks again!

[mavhc]

Force bitlocker for all usb drives (although this does stop being able to delete files from cameras, and stops microbit via the standard usb drive emulation).

 

In general people don't understand computers, they know one way that seems to work, they have no idea why that works.

 

But mostly you need a reason why OneDrive is better. You have to sign in, it's slower, less reliable, and now all your documents are easily able to be stolen by 3 billion people, because everyone reuses passwords.

[free780]

@mavhc And how's Information Protection and Conditional Access in G Suite?

[mavhc]

No idea, sounds a bit enterprisey. Does it cost money?

 

Google did just announce using your android 7.0 or higher phone as a bluetooth security key though, that should save money for doing easier 2FA when phones don't have an internet connection.

[free780]

Yep costs money for the features you want usually. But also may come into play if we all end up having to use information rights management is a few years.

[mavhc]

I'll just keep the files off the internet for free then

[FragglePete]

I've been playing with the new client that does the per machine install. So far, so good. Setup is ~15 secs after first logon which is pretty impressive. I'm going have a play with GPOs, etc but thinking I may try and reduce the need for a home drive for our new intake this September. Still keep it but reduce the quota, hide it or whatever - not sure yet - ideas still formulating. It'll then be down the the Teachers on their first ICT lesson to get the message across to use OneDrive to save 'stuff' instead of Home.

 

Pete

[DrCheese]

Debating the same for Year 7 - Just straight up redirect their workareas to Onedrive (So they have no "Home" on the network) - Now the per machine install means it doesn't take 5+ minutes after logon to actually work... It'll depend on how well/seemless I can get it tho (We have SSO etc)

 

I still can't quite get my head around how to properly architect sharepoint/teams for general staff tho (I'm in the process of moving our (as in IT department) stuff up)

Edited May 1, 2019 by DrCheese

[mavhc]

One problem you might cause is more lock in, harder to switch from one cloud provider to another, less likely other OSes will work as well.

[synaesthesia]

Teams allows the use of other file storage systems such as dropbox, drive etc too so that would help negate this to some effect.

[free780]

Would you really change though. It would be so painful moving away from MS 365.

[DrCheese]

eh, either service has migration tools now so I don't think it's the end of the world. Both work on virtually every device now too.

[ifillingham]

I'm very interested to see how things progress in your schools. I have just taken on a whole school IT project essentially looking at any aspect of IT within the school. I'm starting to collect information from staff on how they use IT, the issues they have and support they need. I have bitten off more than I can chew but it needs to be done!!