Moving away from the local OneDrive client on shared PCs – Formatting Battles🤺

[talksr]

Hello everyone,

I’d be really grateful to hear if anyone else is fighting this same battle.

I'm currently trying to move staff away from using the local OneDrive desktop app on our shared Windows 11 PCs. While it’s fine for staff with dedicated machines, it's just not feasible for hot-desks and shared classroom PCs. Every time a user logs in, the computer attempts to sync their OneDrive, along with all their linked SharePoint document libraries.
I do already have the Files on Demand policy enabled so it doesn’t download the actual files, but syncing all that metadata still takes a very long time.

Because of our large SharePoint shares, this sync can take hours, and in the meantime, staff moan that their files are missing, whereas if they used Onedrive online, everything would be instantly available and synced.

My push has been to get staff to simply access OneDrive via the browser and edit/create documents using the web apps. However, the constant pushback I get is about printing and formatting. They complain that when they print from Word / PowerPoint Online, the formatting is always off. Documents perfectly sized for one A4 sheet on Word application end up spilling onto two, meaning worksheets for the kids end up all skewwhiff and unusable.

I’ve opened exhaustive support cases with Microsoft about the web app formatting issues, but we haven't reached a resolution. My current advice to staff is to create the documents from scratch in Word Online so the formatting stays consistent, but as you can imagine, that isn't a popular answer.

I really don't want to keep the local OneDrive app on our shared systems. It's a massive drain on resources and just doesn't scale well when staff have massive SharePoint libraries linked to their accounts.

 

My questions for you all are:

1. How are you handling OneDrive on shared/public systems? 
2. Have you managed to successfully ditch the local sync app?
3. Has anyone found a reliable fix for the browser formatting/printing issues? 

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! 

[Boredguy]

I turned off the SharePoint links in OneDrive via Powershell for our site, so only documents that get synchronised are their own OneDrive resources (partly cause some staff had a SharePoint site linked and when 1 person deleted folders to clean it up, they logged on to another device and it synced them all back again)

 

I have our workstations set to different profile clean up durations based on the typical use.

Stations with high user use in a day cleans profiles up daily (such as student stations, Staff Room etc)

Lower user stations get profiles cleaned up every 5 days (Classrooms/Offices where 2 or 3 users every couple of days)

Finally stations which typically have the same user on it, have on a 30 day clean up.

 

You users can still use the fill Office applications, if you spend the time training them on how to open/navigate OneDrive/SharePoint sites via the Web interface lists for the files within at apps, instead of "This PC" or always using the File Browser to open docs up outside of the application (and we all do it as it's so ingrained in our behaviour)

[DrCheese]

We use Cloud Drive Mapper - £900 or so a year for us

https://www.iamcloud.com/cloud-drive-mapper/

 

Worth it because it avoids the problems you mention

 

 

[talksr]

26 minutes ago, DrCheese said:

We use Cloud Drive Mapper - £900 or so a year for us

https://www.iamcloud.com/cloud-drive-mapper/

 

Worth it because it avoids the problems you mention

 

 

Ohh interesting, thank you, interesting, will give this some consideration. 

[thimon]

+1 for CloudDriveMapper. Been using it for years