OneDrive for Students - No Local Storage, Getting Set Up/Sanity Check?

[Miscbrah]

Hello Edugeeks - decided it's time to join the 2020s and *deep breath* stop using local storage and just get students saving to OneDrives exclusively. Probably worth mentioning early I do NOT want this to affect staff yet nor break anything for staff; that's coming later in the year and I need to give it way more thought. Staff will occasionally log into these PCs though. Students however are a clean slate at this stage so I'm thinking it's a good time to go for it.

 

They'll still have AD/domain accounts to log onto PCs in traditional fashion, just think it's time to cloud-ify storage for them. Usual (I'm guessing it'd be usual) wish-list applies:

 

1 - Stop them saving to C:, or indeed any other unwanted crevice of the PC or network other than OneDrives.

2 - Stop them seeing other OneDrives or areas they shouldn't see.

3 - Stop PCs themselves filling up with cached garbage if that's a common (or even uncommon) pitfall I can avoid here.

 

At this point, before I set the accounts up and still have just about a fortnight to test this, my thinking is:

 

A - No home area set in path in AD (be brave Miscbrah...)

B - No traditional folder redirection set (as in, nothing set in group policy in User Config > Policies > Windows Settings > Folder Redirection.)

C - In group policy, PC OU for the IT suite gets:

Computer Config > Admin Templates > OneDrive >

     Silently sign in users to the OneDrive sync app - Enabled

     Use OneDrive Files On-Demand - Enabled

     (And the big one) Silently move Windows known folders to OneDrive - "Documents" and "Pictures" ONLY (along with tenant ID. And I'm guessing without notifying users - I think it'll jsut fox them.) "Desktop" omitted and redirected separately to a share they can't save to, for the sake of enforcing a standard set of shortcuts. They've had that set for years now so are used to it.

     (Along with the other big one) Prevent users from redirecting their Windows known folders back - Enable

     Then turn Storage Sense on (Admin Templates > Storage Sense) to stop the whole "PC fills up with cached garbage" situation.

 

D - User policies for the students will be set to:

User Config > Policies > Admin Templates > 

     Microsoft Office > Default save location (set to OneDrive) - I must get the admx files for 2024 and do this...

     

Then by my reckoning I should achieve a euphoric state of flawless digital triumph.

 

But just in case that's not right, or vaguely right, or someone (I daresay most people these days) have done this differently or better, is there anything else you'd recommend I do at this stage or change? I do have Burconix Cloud Connect which is rad tbh but think I've all but moved away from that for students with the above.

 

So yeah, firstly thanks for reading all that! Please chime in with anything in the above that looks doomed or broken or terrible! Thanks all!

 

Edited August 25 by Miscbrah

[Miscbrah]

Plodding along here! Little way into the term now but still not got this down. Progress made however.

 

Have a *sigh* Group Policy setup I inherited with one big giant policy with the student lockdown settings in it. With that policy off, all known folder redirection to OneDrive works and with it on it doesn't, so the next hurdle is rummaging through this for culprits and turning them off and on and seeing what breaks and what works.

 

When that's done should be a lot closer.

 

Not using CloudConnect at this point, seems to all be working (bar that policy) with the vanilla Windows offerings. Wish me luck everyone...

[Miscbrah]

Okay we're getting there! Students now log in, the "Known Folder" redirection (Desktop, Documents and Pictures) seem to sync up (and down again) to and from OneDrive. No interactions needed from students, just provisions when that logs in.

 

Neat.

 

Want to have a good long test and it's all still locked down (make sure we don't have them saving to obscure corners/armpits of 😄 or anything.)

 

Happily this doesn't affect staff yet (not ready for that migration at the moment) as any sort of folder redirection just breaks this - so good news there too.

 

Feels like I'm somewhere near the last person in the world to be doing this but if anyone else is stuck and comes across this can share the policies etc that got me going. Most success came after enabling SSO and stopping folder redirection happening at all (even desktop.)

[psydii]

FWIW our GPO architecture dates back to 2003-2006ish.  When we moved over we set a policy with a higher precedence, and that policy changed redirection and applied OneDrive related settings, filtered based on group membership (because we were rolling it out progressively).  That said our method predates "known folder move" by about five years, so YMMV.

I would caution that we put in place seating plans ahead of the migration so students OneDrive's were basically already sync'd (after they'd logged on once in that room) when/where ever they log on, this seems to have eliminated "missing files" problems that some schools seem to suffer with.  We do have a 1G/s link up and down, so syncing is pretty quick (but way way slower than just mapping a drive).

 

[Miscbrah]

1 hour ago, psydii said:

FWIW our GPO architecture dates back to 2003-2006ish.  When we moved over we set a policy with a higher precedence, and that policy changed redirection and applied OneDrive related settings, filtered based on group membership (because we were rolling it out progressively).  That said our method predates "known folder move" by about five years, so YMMV.

I would caution that we put in place seating plans ahead of the migration so students OneDrive's were basically already sync'd (after they'd logged on once in that room) when/where ever they log on, this seems to have eliminated "missing files" problems that some schools seem to suffer with.  We do have a 1G/s link up and down, so syncing is pretty quick (but way way slower than just mapping a drive).

 

 

Thanks. Yeah throughout this process I'm not having a super warm and fuzzy feeling about it... randomly losing files is of course no flippin' good! Similar vintage here also in GP but I've tinkered and changed loads. Add in loads more following this saga!

 

Also 1G/s here and since the first weekend with it, provisioning is actually pretty swift and it does seem to do the redirection thing nicely. Though having said that it's only me gently testing things at this point and not a class of thirty shrieking students.

 

Still have a tiny bit of optimism going though, which is nice. With any luck it all "just works".

[psydii]

We actually find it about as reliable as redirected folders - which also used a sync engine under the hood (the csc.sys driver/redirector that actually sat between the gui and network shares). 

That said locating missing files is much easier with OD - the online recycle bin and  that "cached" files are in a user accessible folder  enable  self-service recovery by students/teachers.