Moving Shared Drives to SharePoint - any pointers!

[mdrabble]

Will be looking to migrate our Student Shared Document and Staff Shared Document to their own SharePoint sites.

 

Sites have been created and I've just fine tuning the permission on them.

 

For those schools which have made the move, how did you go about this - would you mind sharing your process and experiences?

 

Cheers

[Katy]

Staff drive:

 

We made a new set of folders called "Teams", with one subfolder per department. We then asked staff to put anything they wanted to keep within these folders. We then moved everything in these folders to individual teams (one per department) - as a team is just a sharepoint site we just dumped everything in the "General" folder/channel, then set the staff drive as read only for a year so they could access anything they'd forgotten.

Some departments organised properly, others just copied everything from their old shared folder to the new one and retained the mess.

 

Bit of resistance at first but when they realised they could access it from home without having to mess about with remote desktop they came around. We disabled remote desktop shortly after this (our MIS is web based so nothing left that they'd need RDP for). Once Covid and the lockdown appeared they'd been used to using Teams for just over a year so all went well.

 

Student Drive:

Migrated this in its entirety to a sharepoint site, access via the web browser. Not sure how much use the old drive ever got but the kids have got used to it.

 

We used the Sharepoint Migration Tool to do the file lifting.

[thimon]

Like Katy, we used the SharePoint Migration Tool. We've used one SharePoint site, with multiple Document libraries for each "file share", with different permissions in place for each library. Using Cloud Drive Mapper to have the libraries mapped on school Windows devices for all users.

[mrstrong]

@mdrabble did you create Teams first? Just been looking into this myself. Not really used teams/sharepoint before

but want to start moving stuff to cloud so did a little experiment (all in chrome browser):

 

I created a test team and a few channels, then in the channel's files tab, open in sharepoint

then click Documents on lhs to see channels as folders

then click sync which opens onedrive to sync all folders to windows explorer (local on pc)

I created a new local folder in windows explorer under the synced documents

this synced up to sharepoint but did not create a channel in teams

I also added a Document Library in sharepoint and again this is not visible in teams.

 

Not sure if I'm using it as intended but I think I could see this working for staff to upload

stuff they want from shared network drives to the cloud.

 

I don't like the two views/interfaces of teams and sharepoint to the cloud files but I guess you

get used to it and staff will adapt their workflow over time.

[mdrabble]

@mrstrong not used teams - created the sharepoint sites manually.

 

 

Student SharePoint Site

Edited the site permissions to rename the visitor group to show as student read only just to make it obvious that anyone in that group had read only permissions to site

 

Created a couple folders and added some test users but that is as far as I got for the student sharepoint site.

 

Same for then staff sharepoint site.

 

 

I have since created a IT HelpGuide site with 2 document libraries - for for all user guides with everyone as read only and a second for staff guides with just staff added as read only.

 

Tested with student account and the staff library does not appear for students.

 

Hope that helps

[MS2011]

@mrstrong not used teams - created the sharepoint sites manually.

 

 

Student SharePoint Site

Edited the site permissions to rename the visitor group to show as student read only just to make it obvious that anyone in that group had read only permissions to site

 

Created a couple folders and added some test users but that is as far as I got for the student sharepoint site.

 

Same for then staff sharepoint site.

 

 

I have since created a IT HelpGuide site with 2 document libraries - for for all user guides with everyone as read only and a second for staff guides with just staff added as read only.

 

Tested with student account and the staff library does not appear for students.

 

Hope that helps

 

Did you just created one sharepoint site to all students and moved their home drive ?

 

And how they are acceding their home drive individually?

 

Thanks

[mdrabble]

Only using SharePoint to hold shared docs.

 

Will use OneDrive to hold User data but that way way off at the moment as want to get bulk of shared documents moved over.

 

God knows how staff will cope - they don’t even know/remember how to access the IT HelpGuides I set up despite me emailing everyone almost monthly about how to access it.

[cw222]

Separate sites for departments, with a communication site stuck in as the front page to try to look more snazzy (moved with the Enable-SPOCommSite). Central landing page linked to the SharePoints that the user has access to. We used the SharePoint migration tool, however if doing it again we would probably use the built in Migration Manager.

We moved student and staff home drives via CSV and SharePoint migration tool mapped to their OneDrives. These CSVs were created with powershell and excel.

 

We found that as long as the staff were able to sync the libraries down to file explorer, they didn't really notice / care in terms of accessing files. The main issue that staff have had has been sharing files with one another. They seem to be quite good at it now however, just an initial learning bump.

 

(Edge has a handy(!!!) tool that can see any documents, when someone has shared a "anyone with a link can have access" to everyone in your organisation, so one to be careful of / mitigated against.)

Edited November 23, 2020 by cw222

[mdrabble]

(Edge has a handy(!!!) tool that can see any documents, when someone has shared a "anyone with a link can have access" to everyone in your organisation, so one to be careful of / mitigated against.)

 

Thanks for the heads up on this!

[Boredguy]

Also if any of your currently shared folders contains documents that are used for mail merge, it can be a headache fixing them to work post migration as Office doesn't really like it when we've tried, and there is a "fix" which involves renaming the .docx file to .zip, then editing a file within it to have the URL path for where the source file will be, but it's not a user friendly process.