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OneDrive/SharePoint drive mapper - which one?

mdrabble

By mdrabble
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mdrabble

mdrabble

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We currently use Cloud Connect which is up for renewal soon so I thought I would see what else is out there.

 

I am currently looking at Iam cloud mapper, which appears to work direct to Office 365 and no sync involves (correct me if I am wrong)

 

What other offerings are out there and which do you guys use?

 

Cheers

midweek

midweek

Posted
Posted
IAM Cloud here too. Works well. Occasional issues with local profiles that causes the drives to not show correctly in explorer (it's rare and clearing the local profile fixes it immediately so I haven't bothered investigating further).
  • Thanks 1
KK20

KK20

Posted
Posted (edited)

we use cloud drive mapper. It is OK, it does its job but has issues. If you have a lot of libraries and teams then take care with the multi share, this can throw up loads of overwhelming shares for users, CDM also shares the meta folders - some of which users will have access to. If you share individual libraries you will soon run out of drive letters. CDM does not have the capability to blacklist or whitelist libraries that you want to multishare. Users will also build up a fair cache size if you use it a lot, this can cause blocking issues for clients after a time (we have a small script to prune the cache directory making it a little more reliable).

 

Usage wise it works though apart from media files, the media files are not streamed they are downloaded upon use. It is better to use the browser if you plan to use it for lots of media. File locking when renaming can be a little problematic sometimes, renamed files can sometimes be locked necessitating a "copy the file and wait for the original to unlock" as we all know how sharepoint has zero admin ability to force unlock a file.

 

We do use it and (personally) I find it better than onedrive client sync for the majority of time. Apart from the odd renaming issue the changes are live with no need for a sync, collaborative work seems to be more reliable (although technically it shouldnt matter as desktop apps should sort this out independently of how you opened the file). I worry for the future support of CDM, a few years ago there were multiple updates per year, I dont think it has been updated in the last year.

Edited by KK20
  • 2 months later...
nicholab

nicholab

Posted
Posted (edited)
I am not sure what the right answer is here the officially supported Microsoft way is synchronising the folder to your machine. This seems to be bad news and destined to end in disaster. This is the proper way to do it why are so many people doing it differently? Edited by nicholab
thimon

thimon

Posted
Posted
I think because every environment is different. We didn’t follow MS advice and just dumped all our data into SharePoint, the OneDrive client takes way too long to sync libraries and is forever syncing changes. For this reason cloud drive mapper was a life saver. Their current app has moved to Legacy, with a new version coming out in a few weeks, moving away from using webdav so hopefully faster speeds.
thimon

thimon

Posted
Posted
Ooo. Just watched
pretty cool about macOS support coming soon as well, that will be great! I’ll contact their support tomorrow and see if access to v3 is live. Thank you.
Edu-IT

Edu-IT

Posted
Posted

CDM V3 pre-release update

 

Our soft-launch of CDM V3 continues in phases, and there are a number of milestones ahead to look out for as we head to full public release.

 

CDM V3.15 (pre-release) to go live around 9th Sept. This release will address a number of edge-cases encountered in our launch so far, and bring greater performance and stability to the client in these scenarios.

 

CDM V3 portal “Iris” to open up to pre-release customers on or around 9th Sept (to coincide with V3.15)

 

CDM trial from our website will be switched from V2 to V3 around 16th Sept.

 

CDM V3 portal “Iris” to open up to our partners & resellers in early October.

 

CDM V3 to reach full feature-parity with CDM V2 around the end of October.

 

CDM V3 to go fully public by around the beginning of November.

 

For most of our customers, we expect they will be happy continuing using CDM V2 until at least November. But V3 is now available for any customers, especially those who are experiencing issues relating to V2’s use of webdav. But please note – until V3 reaches full parity with V2 you should ensure comprehensive testing is undertaken with V3 prior to deployment to your end-users to ensure it meets your users’ and organization’s specific requirements.

 

In the meantime we have now launched our CDM V3 knowledge base – https://cdm.iamcloud.info which includes our CDM changelog (which will no longer be available here on our iamcloud.com website going forwards).

  • Thanks 4
DavR

DavR

Posted
Posted
I am not sure what the right answer is here the officially supported Microsoft way is synchronising the folder to your machine. This seems to be bad news and destined to end in disaster. This is the proper way to do it why are so many people doing it differently?

 

Because the official supported Microsoft route is dire, it doesn't scale well at all. A couple of dozen files and five users? Then sync'ing Sharepoint folder to the machine might work for you. As soon as you go much beyond that though, the One Drive client is syncing libraries constantly. Our main Sharepoint library is only a few hundred GB, but would take days to fully sync just the file structure to a users PC..... then they move somewhere else and have to sync it again. It's a nightmare, and generated tonnes of duplicate and conflicting files when we tried it.

 

My advice is either have staff working directly to the Sharepoint share, by opening and closing files directly in Office client, or, use an intermediary tool like Cloud Drive Mapper or equivalent. Either way - work with the live files, don't bother with cached.

 

+1 for Cloud Drive Mapper here. It has it's foibles occasionally, but 99% of the time works just fine, and even has a self-heal button when things go wrong. Be interesting to see what the long-promised V3 holds!

  • Thanks 1
E_G_R2

E_G_R2

Posted
Posted

We get Staff and pupils to open files direct in either the app or on the site itself. We also still use Teams for teaching so staff place links to the files on the teaching team. So far we don't have a call for the return of 'share drivers' or synchronization (which is blocked)

 

The IT staff are also teaching the kids how to use the search function in SharePoint which is the easiest way for finding files that we have found. Our pupils don't seem hung up about where files are, they just want to access them and do this as above.

 

Maybe we are lucky with this mindset?

  • 4 months later...
kennysarmy

kennysarmy

Posted
Posted

For anyone using Cloud Drive Mapper can you shed any light on the below drive stats which are displayed in File Explorer during our trial testing?

 

The user has one small WORD document in their OneDrive.

Capture.JPG

chris11256

chris11256

Posted
Posted
For anyone using Cloud Drive Mapper can you shed any light on the below drive stats which are displayed in File Explorer during our trial testing?

 

The user has one small WORD document in their OneDrive.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]73118[/ATTACH]

With Cloud Drive Mapper that'll be the local hard drive/ssd capacity & free space rather than the users actual Onedrive.

  • Thanks 2
psydii

psydii

Posted
Posted
Because the official supported Microsoft route is dire, it doesn't scale well at all. A couple of dozen files and five users? Then sync'ing Sharepoint folder to the machine might work for you. As soon as you go much beyond that though

 

This is not our experience at all. We've been all in on OneDrive/Sharepoint since 2020 and were 50% there in 2018-2019.

 

We have 30Tb of files in OneDrive/SharePoint here. 2000 people hot desking over 600-ish devices. Basically no problems. Certainly more reliable than Windows file shares were in 2011-2014.

 

Yes you do have to keep an eye on the number of files any given user is syncing (300,000 is the point at which performance is said to tank). But so far only those who have installed python or powershell modules, or got backups of GPOs/ADMXs in their Onedrive get close to these limits.

 

We broke the legacy staff shared drive into separate SharePoint sites, and most "all staff" resources are accessed via the browser through a "Hub Site". Each team has a Team, and thus one Sharepoint Document Library per department.

 

We initially made efforts with training around syncing document library's but increasingly everyone just uses a browser or the UI built into the Office/365 Apps to access their files.

 

Student OneDrive sync automatically. Every class has a Team, and assignments are set through that (where the output is in Word/Powerpoint etc)

 

For students whose course produce/work with non 365 App file types, we (ab)use the Teams Assignment / Student Work document library system. Teachers of these courses have their students link their class Team student work folder to their OneDrive. It works *really* well - we don't need to maintain any automation beyond SDS, and they need to engage a little with learning how to use the tools (SharePoint/OneDrive/teams) to get the job done - everybody benefits.

midweek

midweek

Posted
Posted
For anyone using Cloud Drive Mapper can you shed any light on the below drive stats which are displayed in File Explorer during our trial testing?

 

The user has one small WORD document in their OneDrive.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]73118[/ATTACH]

 

The stat is the physical local disk as I understand it. If you map multiple drives they all show the same drive space.

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