Cloud migration from on-prem storage to SharePoint & OneDrive

[kennysarmy]

Interested in similar school's plans to migrate to cloud storage.

[russlp]

We've moved all our staff & Student home drives, just the shared areas to go!

[psydii]

We started once OneDrive Files on Demand was available with Windows 10 1709.

 

Three departments and an handful of users went over in 17-18

Staff Home drives and Yr 7 in 18-19

Year 7, 12 and 13 at the beginning of 19-20

The rest of the shared folders and student home folders went over between 10th and 17th March 2020.

 

Mailboxes went over 18-19.

[thimon]

Pretty much the same. Jumped over to OneDrive as soon as files on demand was released. Shared drives onto SharePoint a year after that. Kept file server for a while for multimedia, however switched that off last year. No NAS, no file server, happy days.

[mrbios]

Only just starting with Y7, 12 and 13 this year. Making sure those are all good then doing the rest gradually.

 

Unfortunately i get held back in previous years due to a deputy head not wanting to lose the facility to jump into students home folders to retrieve work (we have a read only group that has access to all student home folders) As well as a little apprehensive with OneDrives past implementations in Windows, given the whole "log off while it syncs and your files stay there" thing, but that doesn't seem to be an issue now (right? It just takes its time logging off until files have finished syncing?)

[psydii]

Only just starting with Y7, 12 and 13 this year. Making sure those are all good then doing the rest gradually.

 

Unfortunately i get held back in previous years due to a deputy head not wanting to lose the facility to jump into students home folders to retrieve work (we have a read only group that has access to all student home folders) As well as a little apprehensive with OneDrives past implementations in Windows, given the whole "log off while it syncs and your files stay there" thing, but that doesn't seem to be an issue now (right? It just takes its time logging off until files have finished syncing?)

 

Not sure, but since Windows 7, the default set up with redirected folders / SMB shares would have files cached locally and lazy-sync'd back to the server at the computer's leisure. It all happened deep in the filesystem/redirector, and on fast enough networks/servers you should never have noticed, but, catastrophic data loss bugs aside (hello kb2775511 et al), unless you were uploading gigs of data suddenly (like a class full dumping video/photography camera footage from memory cards) you'd never notice.

 

We've found the same to basically be true for OneDrive, as long as you don't leave saving to the last second, its fast enough. Also we've found almost everyone is working in webapps/teams these days, so the data/change exists in the cloud first.

 

For behaviour management reasons we have seating plans. This is extremely helpful since students use the same computer each lesson, which overcomes (almost) any issue where a file didn't make it to the cloud last time.

 

Finally, (and we've not done this in a while so it might have changed) If you invoke a profile delete through WMI and the profile contains Onedrive files that are marked as having a sync pending, the delete leaves them on disk.

[mcolbourn]

We are slowly moving over to OneDrive and Teams\SharePoint, we are taking a drip drip approach where we are moving slowing but making sure that everyone is happy and onboard with the process and have not run into any major show stoppers as of yet.

[dmj]

I think we I did it back in 2014/2015 or something, moved to chromebooks

[mdrabble]

We have been moving things over slowly - this is because staff don't like change!

 

We first moved Student Shared Area, gave that 12 months to embed (2022)

We had a drive with departmental folder - this moved to separate SharePoint areas for each department (May 2023)

All new users are now fully cloud - so current Year 7 and 12 and any new staff.

 

Plan is to move all students to cloud in the summer and then staff in October

 

We purchased Cloud Connect, and have mapped drives and works well - especially for those who are less tech savy and like using the drive method.

[DavR]

I migrated all of our data at once, during the summer hols in 2022. We're not a huge school, and I had the luxury of mandating a two week full shutdown to do the work.

 

It went fairly smoothly, all told, although I wasted a lot of time getting the new SharePoint sites to sync to PCs via OneDrive client, only to find out how horribly impractical that was in real usage. We got IAM Cloud Drive Mapper to replicate users mapped drives instead, whilst at the same time, writing user guides for people to use SharePoint natively from home.

[TheHyperTechie]

Not sharepoint/onedrive but I did move all drives (including shared) over to Google Drive a few months ago.

[MYK-IT]

Similar situation here, whereby we are currently finishing off migrating Student User Areas over to OneDrive etc.

 

I just have a question to those who have migrated their legacy 'shared drives' over to SharePoint, have you literally created a dedicated SharePoint site (or sites) with a Document Library (or libraries)? For example, Student Resources (and similar for Staff Resources)?

 

And although you can directly browse to resources stored on OneDrive/SharePoint from within Office 365 applications, how do you support non-Microsoft applications that need access to the SharePoint-based resources? Of course, we have OneDrive client installed & configured (e.g. KFM, on-demand etc) but have you got your users to create 'Add shortcut to OneDrive"? I am aware that some have previously setup a 'SharePoint' sync via GPO/Intune etc, but conscious that is device specific and can take time to sync (and would need on-demand sync only).

 

Many Thanks,

Edited April 26, 2024 by MYK-IT

[supportman]

We moved back in covid times. I couldn't imagine having to run a local file storage again, so much hassle.

 

Sharepoint works very well.

[DavR]

And although you can directly browse to resources stored on OneDrive/SharePoint from within Office 365 applications, how do you support non-Microsoft applications that need access to the SharePoint-based resources? Of course, we have OneDrive client installed & configured (e.g. KFM, on-demand etc) but have you got your users to create 'Add shortcut to OneDrive"? I am aware that some have previously setup a 'SharePoint' sync via GPO/Intune etc, but conscious that is device specific and can take time to sync (and would need on-demand sync only).

 

This is another reason we bought IAM Cloud Drive Mapper to replicate classic mapped drives. We're using Office 2019 (for reasons), and for the life of me I couldn't find a way to make the Sharepoint sites easily visible to staff in the Open and Save dialogues. Same with any third party software.

[MYK-IT]

We moved back in covid times. I couldn't imagine having to run a local file storage again, so much hassle.

 

Sharepoint works very well.

 

 

Hi @supportman,

 

May I asked how you have setup and use SharePoint for (shared) resources (beside the obvious web-access) are you using OneDrive Client combined with 'add shortcut to OneDrive' or 'Sync' a SharePoint Library so that non-Microsoft applications can access/save resources stored there?

 

Using Office 365 to directly open from or save to OneDrive / SharePoint is not an issue and I don't want to resort to legacy drive mapping

 

Thanks,

[supportman]

Hi @supportman,

 

May I asked how you have setup and use SharePoint for (shared) resources (beside the obvious web-access) are you using OneDrive Client combined with 'add shortcut to OneDrive' or 'Sync' a SharePoint Library so that non-Microsoft applications can access/save resources stored there?

 

Using Office 365 to directly open from or save to OneDrive / SharePoint is not an issue and I don't want to resort to legacy drive mapping

 

Thanks,

 

Most people just use the SharePoint web access where we have a "staff team" and an associated shared files area there. We have a link for it on our staff homepage and auto bookmarks in edge created for all users.

 

Awkward staff who need to scan documents or do something funky with older software simply use the "sync" button on the web to link in OneDrive.

 

Staff use OneDrive client and web.

 

Students use OneDrive web.

[mrstrong]

... I wasted a lot of time getting the new SharePoint sites to sync to PCs via OneDrive client, only to find out how horribly impractical that was in real usage. We got IAM Cloud Drive Mapper to replicate users mapped drives instead, whilst at the same time, writing user guides for people to use SharePoint natively from home.

 

I've put some stuff in teams and showed staff how to sync the folder (from teams in the web browser). It then seems to use onedrive to do the sync and they end up

with a folder in explorer a bit like a mapped drive. Is that what you mean and if so why did you find it "horribly impractical" / advantages of paying for IAM Cloud Drive Mapper ?

[MYK-IT]

Most people just use the SharePoint web access where we have a "staff team" and an associated shared files area there. We have a link for it on our staff homepage and auto bookmarks in edge created for all users.

 

Awkward staff who need to scan documents or do something funky with older software simply use the "sync" button on the web to link in OneDrive.

 

Staff use OneDrive client and web.

 

Students use OneDrive web.

 

Thanks @supportman

 

I realise half the battle is getting users away from drive letters etc. and using web-based etc. but I am intrigued that you've managed to migrate students to OneDrive web-only! In the sense that we have non-Microsoft applications (3D Design. Sibelius, CuBase, Adobe etc) and if we migrated from (and revoked) on-site file shares to OneDrive how that would work? As in, you'd need to initially save work locally (somewhere!) then upload via OneDrive web (as opposed to OneDrive client).

 

Also for resources located on SharePoint libraries (e.g. files that use the aforementioned non-microsoft products)

 

Thanks,

[DavR]

I've put some stuff in teams and showed staff how to sync the folder (from teams in the web browser). It then seems to use onedrive to do the sync and they end up with a folder in explorer a bit like a mapped drive. Is that what you mean and if so why did you find it "horribly impractical" / advantages of paying for IAM Cloud Drive Mapper ?

 

I tried to be clever, and provision that sync folder for the SharePoint sites in explorer using GP. Which I successfully did for all staff, but due to the size of our SharePoint sites, it would take hours / days to synchronise and show the available files to the user. Then, if more than one person accessed a file, we were getting synchronisation errors, and duplicate copies of everything.

 

In a nutshell, synchronising files up and down using OneDrive caused us a lot of delays and conflicts. Using Cloud Drive Mapper, you're always working on the "live" copy of a file, so far fewer conflicts.

 

It may work OK with smaller SharePoint sites, and users only syncing ad hoc files, I don't know. But I far prefer working live, after our experiences.

[supportman]

Thanks @supportman

 

I realise half the battle is getting users away from drive letters etc. and using web-based etc. but I am intrigued that you've managed to migrate students to OneDrive web-only! In the sense that we have non-Microsoft applications (3D Design. Sibelius, CuBase, Adobe etc) and if we migrated from (and revoked) on-site file shares to OneDrive how that would work? As in, you'd need to initially save work locally (somewhere!) then upload via OneDrive web (as opposed to OneDrive client).

 

Also for resources located on SharePoint libraries (e.g. files that use the aforementioned non-microsoft products)

 

Thanks,

 

Yeh we don't really use any 3rd party software these days other than maybe computer science, but even there things like VSCode can be used to interface with GtiHub or Onedrive.

[kennysarmy]

Migration completed - not without a fair amount of hassle!!

 

The company who assisted used Migration Manager - which seems to have just missed huge chunks of folders.

They also did an initial seed a week before the cutoff date and when the next copy was made it did not pick up all the changed files.

Consequently we've had staff and students this week emailing and knocking on our door asking why edited files in the last week of term haven't appeared in OneDrive or SharePoint and why huge areas of their data have just not been migrated!!

 

We were told by the company assisting that this is quite normal !

 

And that there are no logs or error reports created during the migration to pinpoint any data that fails to migrate.

 

Is this right?