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Hi All,

We are in the process of migrating to Office 365 Business Premium. We currently have three office’s (in three different countries) all with its own Windows Server box, acting as a file server and then use DFSR to automatically replicate changes to each site… not perfect but it works well enough. These file exist on each server as D:\Public\ and then shared to each office, presented as a network drive on each computer (E:)

With the migration to O365, I am looking to change this to OneDrive for Business / SharePoint and sort of mirror the same (if not slightly improved) end user experience.

We have ~250GB of objects (~11k folder, ~141k files) we will want to add to the shared storage but wouldn’t want all of this synced to each users workstation/device and with certain users being authorised to certain folders/files etc.

Few questions really;

•What’s the best way to do this?

•Can someone point me to some good and current articles/documentation for doing this kind of thing?

•Any best practices and pitfalls to look out for?

Many thanks,

Tarran

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  • What is the best way to do this? It depends :-). Too many variables to answer generally.

A couple of high level thoughts -

1.) Treat OneDrive for Business as a replacement for \my documents and SharePoint for the shared data.

2.) Plan very carefully. There are several tools on the market that will help with the migration, and even more partners that have done this many times over.

Feel free to shoot a mail to spiceagent@spiceworks.com if you would like help filtering through some solutions.

Mark

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Well, I’ll add some other perspective.

I agree with Mark, OneDrive is a “replacement” for a personal drive\my docs. OD is just a segment of Sharepoint, but it was designed to be kept in sync with a folder on the user’s workstation. That being said, the sync client is a massive disaster. Totally unusable for more than 500-1000 items. I did read recently that MS is about to release an updated client, so time will tell.

Also, NO one has access to the OD folder for a user, but that user. Not even you. So if someone needs something and the user is out, you either change their password so you can access it, or the other person waits.

The easiest way to put data into Sharepoint is by creating a basic folder structure, open a top-level folder with Windows Explorer (in IE, go to Library and Open with Explorer) and then copy files and folders that way. I like Richcopy for larger numbers of files. Oh, and you’ll see the SP window say “Drag files here.” Only files, you can’t drag and drop folders. Another reason to use Windows Explorer.

We recently moved our primary stuff to O365 doing what I explained. We have one main site, I replicated our team folder structure from our local share, and copied most, not all, but most of the data to the respective folders in O365.

Only one or two people here use OneDrive and that’s only because they got started with it before we realized how useless the sync client is.

Oh, and unless someone can show me differently, using O365 is not a better user experience. It has some pluses, like access from everywhere, but it’s confusing in a lot of ways.

For example, there are lots of ways to share a file, and once again, more choice means more confusion. Office 2016 should help that quite a bit, it’s a lot more tightly integrated with O365, and login and share options are right there on the Ribbon, as opposed to being two or three clicks deep in the File menu.

And we just found out the hard way that if a user shares a file (which is easy and simple, good) it removes the inherited permissions and makes them unique. Which now screws up access for someone else that should have had access to that file all along. That was fun to track down and correct.

And you need to scan folder/file names for illegal characters **~"#%&:<>?/{|}** and for file paths longer than 255 characters. I’m looking but I can’t lay my fingers on the two utilities I used. I’ll post them when I find them.

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Count path length:

And I just remembered I used XYplorer’s search function to search for each illegal character. But Google has a lot of hits on how to search for them.