iamLeon

Hi, I don't want to be *that guy*... So full disclosure, I work for the company I'm about to recommend, but in this case it should hopefully be genuinely helpful advice. This tool allows you to map drives to your OneDrive for Business & SharePoint Online libraries to avoid the issues of sync (e.g. meaning that it's fine for users to roam between machines): https://www.iamcloud.com/cloud-drive-mapper The drives look and feel like normal network drives, and can have the same group policies applied to them. Several hundred schools, colleges and universities in the UK (and beyond) use it for precisely the reasons you mention.

Hey Michael. I completely understand your point. The only thing I will say is that we've put a lot of time, effort and money into developing our technology. We're not as rich as Microsoft, so it's hard for us to give away our features for free. We try our best to keep our prices as reasonable as possible for education. Regarding the price, it is £720 minimum for our platform, but discounts can apply - especially if you're only using Cloud Drive Mapper without anything else on our platform. The reason we charge a minimum price is because we offer a full service - so you get a real person helping you out whenever you need it, and we handle all the maintenance / upgrades / monitoring and if something goes wrong the fixes too. So it's more than just an EXE.

Hey, I work for IAM Cloud, so this is obviously going to be biased. But this problem is precisely what we designed this tool for: Cloud Drive Mapper - Enterprise Cloud Storage | IAM Cloud It can map to SharePoint Online as well as OneDrive, so you can do team storage too if you have SharePoint. It's powered by identity classifications (e.g. group policies) and SSO, so it works exactly like a homedrive. E.g. on a network machine, person 1 logs in & has immediate access to all their storage (and possibly their team storage via SharePoint), they log off, person 2 logs in & has immediate access to their storage (and possibly their team storage via SP).

Hey CamelMan, I do indeed - if you've got any questions please feel free to ask. Sorry, if it was misleading. I should have been more transparent. I've updated my profile so there's full disclosure now.

Gareth - why not federate, then there's only one password anyway? Plenty of cloud-based providers that can take care of this issue for you edu.iamcloud.com / www.onelogin.com / www.okta.com etc

Hey CamelMan, even though IAM Cloud seems a bit overkill, we've found it's actually stupidly cheap even if you only use the SSO, password sync, self-serve password reset etc. You don't need to run any extra servers/VMs either, so there's not much to manage. Does the job!

I'm afraid I'm a bit of a noob so I could be offering up a bit of a red herring here... (sorry). But are your Macs 'bound' to your AD? I think you would need to do this before it was possible to use AD group policy for WiFi. There's an article from TechRepublic about the binding process which is the Mac equivalent to Domain Joining. Not sure if this would help - I'd be interested to hear your solution though.