Map Home Drives to OneDrive?

[JRA]

Afternoon all.

 

Having a muse on this one, seems to me like I'm in something of a unique (and not altogether bad) circumstance with this.

 

So, the crawl away from on-prem storage to Microsoft's online offerings in SharePoint and OneDrive continues. Or rather begins.

 

Staff are handling this gradually and manually, which is quite ace really. This began before I took over (in Sept.) Eventually they'll be fully OneDrive and SharePoint then we can turn off the lot locally.

 

Students however have never had individual logins (primary, never something wanted or needed before now.) We'll be moving though towards 365 logins for them and also leveraging these for Jamf/Apple Classroom.

 

Having no home areas at all yet (because no accounts) I wanted very much to begin by redirecting the lot to OneDrive. Must admit though most everything that I've googled up (that I understand) has been migrating existing files and folders over, but not starting anew.

 

I'm assuming there's something in a single sign-on when the user logs in, which can map H: to e.g. %OneDrive% and then steer folder redirection using that variable. Is it looking like it'll all be that simple or am I in for something more tricksy? Is this even something someone's already done out there?

 

Thanks for reading and if there are any amazing hints or walkthroughs (or even pitfalls to avoid) I'd love a read/opinion/warning.

 

Happy Friday everyone.

[jmak]

You can use group policy to SSO into OneDrive. You can also set specific folders to synchronise to OneDrive (I have documents and desktop). That setup replaces home drives for me.

 

Edit: Happy Friday!

[E_G_R2]

Hi Jmak,

 

have you any good links on how to do this?

[Aprice]

I'd suggest having a look at Cloud Connect from Burconix. We've been trialling it and so far have been quite impressed. Effectively it just maps OneDrive to be their home drive & Sharepoint libraries as network drives.

 

We found that the OneDrive PC client was somewhat unreliable and caused a lot of man hours to be spent supporting it. Especially for users that roam PCs

[jmak]

Hi Jmak,

 

have you any good links on how to do this?

We don't have AD/Windows domain where I currently work and the details have changed since I last set it up (the sync client is different and Azure AD Connect has developed), but I've had a read and I think the closest instructions I've found to what I did are as per links below.

 

Summary of process is:

Register device in Azure AD

Set (SilentAccountConfig) Silently sign in users to the OneDrive sync app with their Windows credentials GPO

Set (KFMSilentOptIn) Silently move Windows known folders to OneDrive

 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/use-group-policy#silently-sign-in-users-to-the-onedrive-sync-app-with-their-windows-credentials

 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/use-group-policy#silently-move-windows-known-folders-to-onedrive

 

I'm currently working on setting this up through local group policy - I'll report back if I find out more.

[JRA]

Thanks everyone.

 

Cloud Drive Mapper looks pretty super for all this as it goes. That folder redirection functionality looks super good.

 

Might well be worth a rummage...

[chris_uk]

Thanks everyone.

 

Cloud Drive Mapper looks pretty super for all this as it goes. That folder redirection functionality looks super good.

 

Might well be worth a rummage...

 

We have all staff and student mobile devices with OneDrive redirection just applied through Group Policy. Much easier way of doing it. With files on demand, it just works. This also includes Downloads redirected to it as well.

 

happy to share some group policy screenshots and our config. Drop me a message.

 

Chris

[Sylv3r]

Just as a slight caveat, for those users who are looking to map the staff mydocuments directly to OneDrive there's an issue with running SIMS reports with locked files. ESS have acknowledged this as an issue but have no intention of fixing it - their workaround is to disable / switch off OneDrive when looking to run reports...

[chris_uk]

Just as a slight caveat, for those users who are looking to map the staff mydocuments directly to OneDrive there's an issue with running SIMS reports with locked files. ESS have acknowledged this as an issue but have no intention of fixing it - their workaround is to disable / switch off OneDrive when looking to run reports...

 

Hi,

 

We have all our staff mobile devices with onedrive redirection, no problems with running reports. How are you doing the mapping?

 

Chris

[Sylv3r]

Just using the OneDrive app.

 

Does SIMS Support OneDrive?

________________________________________

Question

Does SIMS have any compatibility or features to allow it to interface nicely with with OneDrive?

Does SIMS and OneDrive work together?

Are SIMS issues caused by OneDrive Supported?

Answer

SIMS has not been tested in environment where personal or document folders has been redirected to a OneDrive Setup, at the time of writing there are no plans to test this.

 

While we don't support OneDrive, this article was created to at least provide a minimum level of assistance to customers facing issues and will be updated as and when new Issues are found or reported to us from customers.

Known Issues:

"SIMS.Processes.DocumentManagement" Error or "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" when attempting to load SIMS or "Access to tempSimsRpt is Denied":

As part of its sync process OneDrive revokes access for other applications when it syncs files. This can cause a problem if the Documents Backup feature is enabled in OneDrive as SIMS will attempt to load the "My SIMS Documents" folder from the user's documents folder and attempt to gain an exclusive lock on the files inside. When this happens OneDrive then assumes that SIMS has made a change to the files and attempts to gain access, thus revoking SIMS access to the folder.

Typically, SIMS will regain control over the files, however it has been noted that OneDrive may intermittently lock out the user and any applications that are not OneDrive then fail to undo the permission changes, resulting in the above errors. As a workaround, it is advised to close OneDrive before using SIMS which should prevent the issues from occurring.

If you experience this issue, close SIMS, delete the "My SIMS Documents" folder from the affected user's documents folder, then re-open and log back into SIMS. This will regenerate the "My SIMS Documents" Folder and allow the user to login again.

This issue can also occur with files inside the “tempSimsRpt” folder also stored in the user’s documents folder. The workaround for this issue is the same as above only deleting the “tempSimsRpt” folder instead of the “My SIMS Documents” folder.

Excel or Word Fails to load a report after it is exported from SIMS, or shows information from a previous report:

In some situations, reports run from SIMS may behave oddly such as loading information from a previous report rather than the selected report, or receiving errors in Word or Excel when opening, similar to the following image:

 

Or "Error 52: Bad Filename or Number" within Microsoft Word.

 

This is due to OneDrive's interoperability with MS Office, forcing MS Office applications to connect to the online version of files in the user's documents folder (online location) instead of the files on disk (physical/local location).

This causes an issue for macros inside the templates SIMS uses. The report will attempt to access the user’s tempSimsRpt folder to get the data needed to compile the report, however instead of being able to access the local version (C:\Users\\Documents\tempSimsRpt) it will instead be passed an online location (https://.sharepoint.com//documents/tempSimsrpt) which the macros are unable to handle.

The workaround is to disable this interoperability which will then allow the macros to work as expected. To do this first open OneDrive and go to Settings:

 

 

Once in Settings, go to the Office tab and uncheck the tick box "Use Office applications to sync Office files that I open":

 

Once unchecked, close any Word/Excel windows and re-run the report. This should now output correctly.

[psydii]

Interesting. The fix for most of this, surely, is to put temporary files in %temp% like any properly behaved application?

[DavR]

We use Folder Redirection to redirect our files to One Drive similar to as described here. I seem to recall reading somewhere the extra OneDrive variable isn't necessary any more, but went with it just in case. We then have SSO and automatic OneDrive config set up in policy.

 

We're also running IAM Cloud Cloud Drive Mapper to provide mapped drives, and this creates a H:\ drive for us mapped to the users OneDrive. That's purely for user access though, we're not putting any folder redirection through that route.

 

A couple of points to be aware of:

• For OneDrive to configure silently using SSO, devices need to be AAD or hybrid AD-joined
  
• I found that the user OneDrive site needed to be provisioned manually in O365 for new users for the redirection to work (if they haven't logged on to provision OneDrive, then at first logon, there's nothing to redirect to).
  

 

Some useful discussion on folder redirection in this thread - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/226083-migration-network-user-folders-onedrive.html

[KK20]

for us we used cloud drive mapper and mapped H: to onedrive. I then restricted quota on MyDocuments. Staff and pupils copied their own stuff from my documents to H: usually after saving or using. after 6 months we dropped the quota to a hundred mb each where it remains now about 18 months later. In the new year access to the old my documents are being removed completely with a view to deleting at the end of the 2022/2023 academic year tidy up.

 

Some staff still use the old H:, most use the blue cloud. Same with sharepoint, some use the old mega library mapped drive (again, CDM) , some use the sharepoint sync.

 

next will be removal of onsite AD and a full migration to AAD, GPOs are slowing going to intune as we speak...

Edited October 20, 2022 by KK20