IT Strategy tips to get staff using onedrive more to save their work

[DrCheese]

Admit this is one of my biggest concerns about swapping over to onedrive - We only have 80gb SSDs in most of our machines (Hey, it was good in 2012 when we bought them!) so storage senses will wipe out cached stuff pretty quickly. If you've got a big file to sync up (Read: Photoshop) at the end of a lesson it might not finish in time - Also, what happens if you have say an internet outage towards the end of a lesson and the student saves then logs off - It won't sync when internet is restored

 

I get why it requires the user to be logged on (Else something could hjack the logon session) but this is a major issue with shared machines.

[mavhc]

Can you make the cached location the file server?

[Katy]

Annoying, it should really be a bg service that is installed once and manages the sync for all users.

 

At least Windows Offline Files defaults to saving directly to the server, not locally to sync at another time. Plus it runs sync on logoff

 

It's really poorly implemented IMO, besides the fact it should run as a service (or at least delay logoff while it finishes uploading) if the end user copies something to "OneDrive" in file explorer, they get a progress bar whizz across and at 100% they go "cool it's done, shut down time". But it's only copied it into C:\Users\Katy\OneDrive - School, and hasn't done any uploading yet.

 

We've moved all home drives to it (and got rid of the shares on the file server) and it's not the nicest thing to look after tbh.

[mikes]

Yeah I didn't really like OneDrive for this same reason, it would cache many GB worth of files in a silly location (the users profile, maybe even roaming?). I would be wary about moving all of our users home folders to the cloud just at this stage (for our school that is)

 

We use Google Docs here. I'm not sure if you could force staff to change over, for us we just let them choose, and now they see the benefits of the cloud solution they all changed over to that. E.G. they can go onto Google Docs, easily find a powerpoint that has been shared with them, and show it to the class.

One thing to ask, do you have single sign on / password sync? I find that helps a lot.

 

When we first started using Google Docs for Daily Worship, the staff did not like it so much; we were running on ancient Intel Pentium laptops that were garbage when they were new; and it ran terrible. (100% CPU)

But we upgraded our machines, the staff are slowly getting used to it, and most of them don't mind it at all now. They like how easy it is to only grant certain people write access to a file. More than one person can work on a document at a time, without file lock errors and all the other nastiness you get in a fileshare. Plus it is a lot easier to share documents with non domain clients. Plus staff are able to comprehend you can copy/paste a URL; not many here can comprehend a directory tree. Another plus for us is instant save and restore that is easy to manage.

 

I can see our staff using their home folders less and less as there becomes less need for them, so I am happy to wait for now. If it wasn't for SIMS, we could look at moving away from Microsoft entirely.

The only thing I wish I'd set up is single sign on, or at least password synchronization. Having another layer of passwords to remember was a big stumbling block for our staff. They would forget their password and the staff would revert back to fileshares.

[MartinT]

My impression of just having moved to OneDrive - School from offline files is that it's a lot better. The sync problem with quick logoff doesn't seem to happen to staff as they leave their machines running all day. Students have suffered from it but we have asked them to look at the OneDrive icon and ensure that it has finished syncing before logging off. I've sent them all an advisory and we are telling the photography teachers who have been most affected.

 

I do hope for a setting that forces wait until OneDrive sync has completed before logoff. Then it'll be perfect.

 

The benefits of everyone's files being available everywhere far outweighs the issues we've seen to date.

[free780]

My impression of just having moved to OneDrive - School from offline files is that it's a lot better. The sync problem with quick logoff doesn't seem to happen to staff as they leave their machines running all day. Students have suffered from it but we have asked them to look at the OneDrive icon and ensure that it has finished syncing before logging off. I've sent them all an advisory and we are telling the photography teachers who have been most affected.

 

I do hope for a setting that forces wait until OneDrive sync has completed before logoff. Then it'll be perfect.

 

The benefits of everyone's files being available everywhere far outweighs the issues we've seen to date.

We've been caught out with this. From Microsofts view the user should really take responsibility for making sure their data is syncd. Originally the sync client was more focused on 1:1 devices and took ages to update and start, which is a bad experience on shared devices. Within Intune if you enable the education policies for device configuration it actually disables the sync client. I guess someone thought, if its not 1:1 your not having the sync client. In the real world we have lots of 3rd party software Adobe/Autodesk etc where you need the sync client as there's no Onedrive connector in the application as in the Office programmes.

 

In theory you could do a logoff script that forced a sync but I'm sure users would just power off the PC.

[DrCheese]

I toy with just giving them onedrive as an extra rather than making it their primary homeshare location - But that means files are all over the place & comes with it's own issues if you later dump homeshares.

 

It's annoying that the cache location can't just be their homeshare & then in time an agent can do the heavy lifting on the server - In an ideal world that means the server would either be perfectly sync'd with Onedrive or at least have a cache of the most recent files. Meaning if you get cut off from the web (Or onedrive dies horribly) you still function.

 

Microsoft are doing this with "Azure file sync" but not onedrive..