OneDrive/SharePoint drive mapper - which one?

[Edu-IT]

Thank you. What I am trying to be clear on is that there's no other reliable to way to map OneDrive/Sharepoint as network drives without the use of CDM. Which I think is what you're all saying?

[DrCheese]

8 hours ago, TheRobins said:

Thats interesting, I am using V3 and just tested its around 15 - 30 seconds on average to update. I noticed that Onedrive Online to CDM is quicker than the other way around. I seem to remember some of their users having their one drive traffic rate limited due to CDM V2 sending large waves of traffic via WebDav to the O365 servers, maybe this feature is to stop that from happening?

 

Yes. We migrated back in Feb to V3 because we were being throttled massively by MS when using V2. Has been painless since ! *touches wood*

[TheRobins]

V3 has been very stable indeed, the odd authentication delay/issue but convinced looking at the logs when they happens its a MS issue and not CDM.

 

 

[Sylv3r]

It's been a long time since I used CDM so I might be missing something but is it not just a case that the user needs to choose 'Add shortcut to OneDrive' in either Teams or Sharepoint? I know it's automated but it will save a few quid.

 

I 

[itskdog]

@Sylv3r

 

It's also possible to auto-sync sites set by the admin, too, similar to clicking the "Sync" button on the web UI, rather than making every user add shortcuts.

 

Unfortunately that's somewhat restrictive in some situations, as you can only sync 300,000 files before it starts glitching, and at least in our case our SharePoint sites are mapped drives from our server that were migrated, and hold data back to the early 2010s.

 

The sync client in our situation is unsuitable to be auto-mapping all the SharePoint sites that staff need due to that limitation. Good for OneDrive (and enables offline working in that case), but not for any shared areas.

[Edu-IT]

On 26/06/2025 at 16:19, Sylv3r said:

It's been a long time since I used CDM so I might be missing something but is it not just a case that the user needs to choose 'Add shortcut to OneDrive' in either Teams or Sharepoint? I know it's automated but it will save a few quid.

 

I 

Also does this not download all files locally, permanently (or at least for 30 days) whereas a product like CDM doesn't? If files are downloading locally then it'll be taking space on like devices and more frequently sychronising? 

[Roberto]

Slightly different audience but where I am now, we just don't bother with mapping OneDrive or SharePoint to any drive letters. We did consider it as part of our migration from Office 2016 to Office 365 a few years ago but decided we'd rather teach people how to use OneDrive natively and keep the money. Tbf, that's probably easier with professionals than students.

[itskdog]

13 hours ago, Edu-IT said:

Also does this not download all files locally, permanently (or at least for 30 days) whereas a product like CDM doesn't?

 

OneDrive's sync client has what it calls "Files On Demand", where by default it just creates dummy files, and it doesn't download them until you first go to open them, then it stays offline until disk space is low or you manually free up space.

[E_G_R2]

2 hours ago, Roberto said:

Slightly different audience but where I am now, we just don't bother with mapping OneDrive or SharePoint to any drive letters. We did consider it as part of our migration from Office 2016 to Office 365 a few years ago but decided we'd rather teach people how to use OneDrive natively and keep the money. Tbf, that's probably easier with professionals than students.

That's how we do it here, the pupils who joined post COVID have taken to it like ducks to water without the need for prompting.

 

The only down side is files for none Microsoft apps such as Tech Soft and Sibelius so we run a hybrid setup with onsite storage still available.

 

Also for SharePoint we have followed Microsoft's best practice and have sites for each faculty rather than lumping the files into one site.  Each site is linked through a hub site.  Again the pupils have taken to it with little problem.  Staff struggle more and in a few instances we have allowed local drive access so that they can use the OneDrive Client for instance when they have files that need to be uploaded onto another website and need access to File Explorer to do this.  Generally I'm fighting using it in the 'old way'.

 

Again with security I'm using the three levels in SharePoint.  If people want this refined then I explain that they should be be working with those files in a team.

 

OneDrive = Personal

Teams = Teams work

SharePoint = Final product

 

Power Automate is good for getting final production documents from Teams into SarePoint

[kennysarmy]

We've hit upon a slight bug in V3.

From CDM support:

 

Thanks, a few clients noticed that too. Its an unexpected issue in 3.19, opening Office files in RO folders causes CDM to crash as they try to open in Co Auth. We have  fix in 3.20 for it but its a few weeks away from release yet. Either 3.18 will need to be put back on there or files in RO folders opened in SP online for now. 

[TechMonkey]

Same as Roberto and E_G_R2, trying to use modern methods.  We don't use mapped drives, we train staff to use the Shortcut method as this is more universally accessible and works really well.  Staff then pass this along to pupils.  Works really well for staff that work on certain areas only as they can shortcut to that folder.

[E_G_R2]

1 hour ago, TechMonkey said:

Same as Roberto and E_G_R2, trying to use modern methods.  We don't use mapped drives, we train staff to use the Shortcut method as this is more universally accessible and works really well.  Staff then pass this along to pupils.  Works really well for staff that work on certain areas only as they can shortcut to that folder.

Shortcut method? Care to explain

[NegativeKillDeath]

8 minutes ago, E_G_R2 said:

Shortcut method? Care to explain

In Teams or SharePoint a Document library will have an option to add shortcut to OneDrive. As you would expect it places a shortcut in your OneDrive to easily access the library. I've not don'e it for a while but a couple of years ago adding a shortcut to your onedrive broke the ability to sync the library via the OneDrive sync client. 

[E_G_R2]

7 minutes ago, NegativeKillDeath said:

In Teams or SharePoint a Document library will have an option to add shortcut to OneDrive. As you would expect it places a shortcut in your OneDrive to easily access the library. I've not don'e it for a while but a couple of years ago adding a shortcut to your onedrive broke the ability to sync the library via the OneDrive sync client. 

Do they need access to the c: drive?

[NegativeKillDeath]

3 minutes ago, E_G_R2 said:

Do they need access to the 😄 drive?

It creates the shortcut in the OneDrive of the user who requests it. As below.

[TechMonkey]

Yep, exactly as @NegativeKillDeath says.  You can't mix shortcuts and syncs to the same area though.  But as far as I know syncs were the outgoing methodology.  I prefer shortcuts as they show up on any device, as they are part of your OneDrive, whereas the Syncs were device dependant. 

[DavR]

On 25/06/2025 at 13:26, itskdog said:

The only thing to be aware of compared to v2 is that file/folder listings update every 5 minutes by default (configurable down to 2 mins), so if one person saves something, it usually won't be visible immediately, when the WebDAV used in v2 was live with the changes on SharePoint/OneDrive.

 

The pros definitely outweigh the cons though, can upload files >4GB (Windows treats all WebDAV servers as FAT) and applications don't go "Not Responding" while the file is uploading. You can turn on a popup to let users know the upload progress so they are less likely to save a file then immediately log off, preventing the upload from completing.

 

The version history issue with ActivInspire (where saving writes a temp file, deletes the existing file, then renames the new version) is still there though (so you'll still be restoring older versions of flipcharts from the recycle bin when they get corrupted), but I do have a feature request open to try and get that resolved.

 

I've noticed version 3 does take a while for drive listings to update, although it's not something I've had time to investigate yet, or even put into the correct form of words. It's a bit of a nuisance, given the selling point for us in v2 was that access was always LIVE to the folder share with no lag and caching, but I get why that's not always possible. @itskdog do you have a link to info to control how often CDM v3 refreshes it's folder listings?

 

We've noticed an increase in ActivInspire files corrupting too, but again, it's not something I've been able to link to any pattern just yet. I was rather hoping deploying the latest version in the summer would resolve it (the blind faith approach...).

[itskdog]

21 hours ago, DavR said:

do you have a link to info to control how often CDM v3 refreshes it's folder listings?

 

It's only slightly hinted at in the KB via this page: https://cdm.iamcloud.info/docs/Content/Overview/ThrottleHandling_Caching.htm, but you can change it in Iris under "Bandwidth" on the left-hand side. You can take it as low as 120 seconds, but obviously the lower you go the more likely you are to run into throttling issues.

[yac2016]

Or Map Sharepoint libraries as network folders via intune...will save costs and takes about 30 mins.

[yac2016]

For info a quick guide:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-map-sharepoint-document-libraries-network-folders-ricardo-barbosa-ts8ke?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via

[DavR]

5 minutes ago, yac2016 said:

For info a quick guide:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-map-sharepoint-document-libraries-network-folders-ricardo-barbosa-ts8ke?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via

 

This looks essentially like the same method as mapping SharePoint libraries via OneDrive and Group Policy, unless there's some extra capability I'm missing?

 

This sounds like a great idea in theory, but we found it to be no good for us, using very large SharePoint sites and a lot of shared devices. The sync just couldn't keep up with the volumes in the times demanded.

[DavR]

1 hour ago, itskdog said:

 

It's only slightly hinted at in the KB via this page: https://cdm.iamcloud.info/docs/Content/Overview/ThrottleHandling_Caching.htm, but you can change it in Iris under "Bandwidth" on the left-hand side. You can take it as low as 120 seconds, but obviously the lower you go the more likely you are to run into throttling issues.

 

Thanks, I will play with that. We never had any issues with throttling under v2, so we can definitely shave some time off that delay I reckon.

[mrstrong]

On 01/07/2025 at 09:42, TechMonkey said:

Yep, exactly as @NegativeKillDeath says.  You can't mix shortcuts and syncs to the same area though.  But as far as I know syncs were the outgoing methodology.  I prefer shortcuts as they show up on any device, as they are part of your OneDrive, whereas the Syncs were device dependant. 

yes we tend to use syncs but if user had a shortcut already the sync failed. Shortcuts do sound like a good idea esp. as not device dependent. Might look at moving over to shortcuts but guess users would have to manually "stop sync" first? I can see teachers getting confused esp as a lot still like the old file explorer / mapped drives

[IAMCloud_Curt]

On 30/06/2025 at 10:20, kennysarmy said:

We've hit upon a slight bug in V3.

From CDM support:

 

Thanks, a few clients noticed that too. Its an unexpected issue in 3.19, opening Office files in RO folders causes CDM to crash as they try to open in Co Auth. We have  fix in 3.20 for it but its a few weeks away from release yet. Either 3.18 will need to be put back on there or files in RO folders opened in SP online for now. 

Hi Kenny,

 

This is now fixed in 3.19.2, you can download from Iris portal.

[IAMCloud_Curt]

On 01/07/2025 at 12:15, DavR said:

 

I've noticed version 3 does take a while for drive listings to update, although it's not something I've had time to investigate yet, or even put into the correct form of words. It's a bit of a nuisance, given the selling point for us in v2 was that access was always LIVE to the folder share with no lag and caching, but I get why that's not always possible. @itskdog do you have a link to info to control how often CDM v3 refreshes it's folder listings?

 

We've noticed an increase in ActivInspire files corrupting too, but again, it's not something I've been able to link to any pattern just yet. I was rather hoping deploying the latest version in the summer would resolve it (the blind faith approach...).

Hi @DavR

 

It's technical name is 'Delta refresh policy' - it's a polling mechanism that we use configurable in your Bandwidth policy settings within Iris. The default is 5 minutes. This is the soft spot between getting remote content updates in that 5 minute windows vs the trade off with Microsoft Graph throttling.

 

The delta refresh basically gets your existing delta token and we ask Microsoft Graph for the latest updates between your last token and then right now (basically any changes in that 5 minute window) we then sync that back down to your local network drives.

 

Beyond the horizon
Looking further ahead to later this year, we’re working on the following enhancements, which are still in the early stages of development:

 

Graph notifications
Graph notifications will be the single most significant mitigation we can make against throttling. Currently, when users browse their drives, it’s all done on-demand in real-time, which is very efficient. However, when a user keeps a folder open in File Explorer for extended periods, CDM must continuously check for updates to ensure that the folder stays up to date.

At present, CDM handles this by polling the Graph API every 5 minutes by default, or as frequently as every 30 seconds. Even with conservative polling intervals, this results in many redundant requests to Microsoft 365, increasing the risk of throttling without significantly improving the user experience.

A far more effective approach is to have the Graph API notify CDM in real time whenever a change occurs. Instead of polling at fixed intervals, CDM will remain idle and only retrieve updates when the API alerts it to a change. This will not only reduce the number of API calls throughout the day but also improve responsiveness, allowing users to see updates almost instantly rather than waiting several minutes (or longer if throttling is in effect).

 

Curt Blunt
Technical Operations Manager
IAM Technology Group Ltd

Edited July 14, 2025 by IAMCloud_Curt