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OK - help me Spiceheads, as I’m totally lost on this one.

Currently looking to migrate Exchange 2013 on-prem to Office 365. Already have AD Sync in place and company is successfully using Skype for Business, no problems.

However, now comes the details regarding OneDrive for Business. We have two central file servers in house that hold all of our company data. Everyone is on laptops, and they do not have folder redirection - thankfully they are good at saving critical stuff to the file shares, and their cat pictures to their computer.

I like the idea of providing my users with OneDrive for Business cause a lot of them using Dropbox, and the 1TB per user storage is attractive and a cool value add.

However, my boss has the concern that with everyone putting files in their own OfB storage, and also on the on-prem file servers, no one will ever be able to find anything.

Now I do see of people saying that you can use SharePoint online to create essentially a file server. Should we replicate our file servers (total file size of 2TB together) to SharePoint? How can I ensure users can edit files without impacting one another? We deal with a lot of Excel files, and I want to make sure if one person has a copy open, everyone else can just open it read-only.

This making any sense?

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Get them to do everything exactly how they still do it, install OneDrive then create folders in their OneDrive for Desktop,Documents and whatever else they use, then move the location of their desktop to the desktop folder in OneDrive and so on and that way they don’t have to change where they put files and it’ll back their documents upto their OneDrive storage (not a perfect backup solution but can be very useful)

Make sure you also get the new client, where you install OneDrive and add registry edits as the older OneDrive for Business app was kinda shit sometimes.

Windows 8.1 doesn’t support the new client yet however plus there’s no SharePoint integration, you can still get the old client, but you’ll probably need to cancel their syncing and restart it as it breaks for no reason.

I wouldn’t move all your data to SharePoint online. Mainly because you get like 500mb for every user you have then its 13p or something for every 1GB you want to add per month so it’ll be best to keep it o your file server.

If you did move to SharePoint, then you can enable checking out/checking in so only one person can work on a file at a time.

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Let me share some understanding on using SharePoint Online as file storage. SharePoint Online is basically made up by the 2 items below.

  1. OneDrive for Business is a document library in each eligible user’s (with valid license) personal site collection.

  2. Private site collections (usually referred as team site)

Based on your consideration above, the best practice is to use item#2 as a file server. Leave item#1 for personal use. Some customer may think that its a waste for not fully utilizing the 1TB storage offered to each personal site.

Using private site collections as file server allows you to manage all the requirements that you mentioned above. However take note that the maximum storage size for a single site collection is at 1TB. Alternatively you can create another site collection or more as long as you have enough storage in your subscription. Have a look at storage allocation below.

Let me know if you need further details, here is probably enough to get you started.

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P0tato,

This sounds the most attractive so far - I kinda like the idea of redirecting the Desktop and Docs to the OneDrive share so it’s transparent to the user that things are being synced up to O365. What are the registry edits that you are referring to? I’m in the process of rolling out Office 2016, so wondering if that is new enough to have the latest and greatest.

Thanks!

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Your info is outdated – Sharepoint Online now includes 1 TB per tenant, plus 500 MB per licensed user, at least for Ex licenses. Changed earlier this year.

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Brandon, it sounds like you have kind of a free-for-all environment now, where everyone sees all the folders and decides what to use for what. This may not be conducive to OD4B really.

What works better is how many companies are set up on their legacy file servers – each user has their own “personal” storage, usually mapped to a drive letter if old school, and then they also have a mapped drive to a “common” file share that has a bunch of folders under it for projects, departments, etc. If you move everything to OD4B then whoever owns a document or folder is going to have to manually Share it with either an individual, a group, or “everyone”.

The big difference is that with OD4B, people can’t go browsing around their colleagues’ folders they way yours can now on the file server. There is a link for “Shared with Me” but that’s a bit clunky for users, and also that “Shared with Me” can’t be synced to the local machine – it’s just a website link. You might need to reprogram users to log into the O365 portal Onedrive as the starting point for working with their files, which can be a big adjustment.

Loading up your common files into Sharepoint is fine, and if you’re on Office 2013/2016 the integration is getting better so it’s pretty painless, but there’s still some delay saving and opening files – some might call it clunky if they’re used to near instant access on LAN file shares.

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You rock John. This makes total sense now.

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If you look at the link it should say, there’s a download and it has two to use, one enables adding accounts and the other defaults it to OneDrive for business, it’s pretty simple shit. It may be different now but check the post it’ll explain it all.

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ODfB is not ready for this.

The sync client is soooo buggy.

Tried it for 6 months on a production network with 20-30 users, using it as the main place for data to live. It caused grief to a lot of people.

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Honestly,

Onedrive for business is good for colab efforts, but it takes one user with sync problems (we have had a few) to wipe out an entire folder and lose the documents. It wasn’t recoverable via onedrive recovery in any way, and I got lucky I had backed everything up before I done any work.

IMHO, your better off looking at cloud/local hybrid storage solutions such as Panzura or Nasuni. This why, data is in the cloud, but you still have local file server, so your not reinventing the entire wheel/trusting your data to some cloud vendor

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OD4B is literally broken. It does not work with SharePoint Online anymore. They claim you can install the old client, but that is not always the case. It might work if you never put the new client on a PC, but once it has been on it causes all kinds of problems trying to make it talk to SharePoint Online. Its so screwed up with what OS or if your have 2016 Office…

Then even if it does work with SharePoint, you have to explain to users that there is something called One Drive for Business and One Drive. They are different, and what goes where. This is incredibly confusing for most users.

Then of course even in the perfect world where both of your One Drives actually install and the user understands where to put what, the syncing fails A LOT. Sometimes you get a red X that lets you know that it fails, although there isnt much you can do about it. Lots of times the files magically disappear. Perhaps this is user error. But the dual version products that work on certain OSes and certain versions of Office (2016 vs 2013 even though it is all 365 WTF!!!) is so confusing that maybe blaming it on user error isnt fair to the users.

MS keeps promising to fix it on their 365 updates videos. But until they do I would only recommend using OD4B if you are a consultant who bills hourly…

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The Next Generation sync client has been pretty much flawless for us, granted at the cost of losing the ability to sync Sharepoint Libraries (which didn’t really affect us much). Sharepoint content is still easy enough to access through built in functionality.

I don’t disagree that the old OD4B client was a mess, but a lot of ranting posted here is outdated by 3 or 6 months, so take it with a grain of salt. Testing it for yourself is the only way to be sure.

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We’ve been throwing around this same question during our office 365 migration projects, and at this point is doesn’t seem worthwhile to “move” a local windows file share to sharepoint online. There are too many potential problems with that solution.

  1. Performance challenges
  2. Bugs - particularly with the onedrive desktop client
  3. Difficulties in managing permissions – nested groups don’t work
  4. Backups – file versioning is not a replacement for backups, so you need to layer on another solution.

You might consider a rollout of sharepoint online PROJECT sites. You also have to make it clear that onedrive is only for documents that you don’t plan to share, or that have limited scope or lifecycle:

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One Drive is still buggy as hell, especially in Windows 10. Almost all of my users have sync issues. Then there’s the confusion between One Drive, One Drive for Business and Sharepoint.

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We love our OneDrive for Business

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It depends on your needs. For personal user drives, OneDrive for Business is great, files are backed up, with Office 2013 and above can edit and collaborate locally (no need for “read-only” or checked out status), and the new preview OneDrive for Business client works absolutely fine without the previous sync issues. The regedits are just files you click from the install folder, one adds you to an update ring I believe, I forget what the other does off hand, but it’s a simple process. This allows users to have their files locally, edit locally, have them backed up online, edit online, collaboration, etc.

Now, for company share to sharepoint sites… That’s different. The new ODfB sync client has dropped site support, for now at least, so no good way to reliably sync that data at this time. If it’s archived and just needs to be stored, and just accessed via the web interface, go for it. If it’s larger files or things that will be used often, users aren’t going to want to have to login to portals and navigate sites to get to it.

So my pref- personal user storage/backup: use OneDrive for Business and the new preview sync client
company share: leave on premise for now till they fix site sync issues with old client or incorporate site sync with the new preview client.

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OneDrive for Business is a great idea that just doesn’t work. The features of sharing documents with other users is one of my favorite parts of it. But, in the past few months, I’ve seen all kinds of syncing issues from files that sync one day to not the next, or Microsoft telling you vaguely that something is wrong and no idea why.

The issue that has convinced me that it’s not worth it is one user I had a couple weeks back was stricken with ransomware. While it was easy to just replace his drive and reimage his machine like new, the files on OneDrive were still encrypted making them unrecoverable. Had he not had his files also saved to a network share that was backed up, he would have lost everything. We made sure to log into it online and wipe everything away before he was able to use it again, but I think he’s also convinced to avoid it and still hasn’t synced any files.

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You might want to check our on-premise file share and sync solution ( http://www.getfilecloud.com) . You can make your existing file shares available to your employees via web and mobile apps. It can also utilize your existing NTFS permissions. If you need more information please feel free to contact me.

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What client? The standard (old) or using the new one? As mentioned, the old did have issues with sync, that’s why they have a whole new client and not just an update to the old. If you’re commenting about the old client, as most with negative feedback have, then the point is moot as the new client addresses the sync issues. The only time there is a sync issue now is with horrible file labeling using outrageous special characters and other similar things.
With the ransomeware, did you try to recover the data from Onedrive? or just look at the initial file and see it was encrypted? There is a version history, and have never, even with ransomware, had an issue pulling up the version prior to encryption.

The ransomware may encrypt a local version of a file, that is then uploaded to Onedrive, and then your latest version in Onedrive is an encrypted version, but the ransomware itself doesn’t propagate to Onedrive. Which means only your latest version is encrypted.

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I want to note, that I am actively working on this, so my input is up to date.

OD4B is so so. It is not as reliable as a sync client as dropbox, but it also has a lot more features that Dropbox does not have. The main problem is to separate the stigmata from OD4B and the comparison to Dropbox.

In short, if you want Dropbox features, Box.com might be better.

That say, you are already using Skype,…are you also using Office365? Office2016 integrates with O365 a lot more (the default location in Word 2016 is already OneDrive).

The main problem is authentication, and that is where most sync issues happen. Every 90 days there is a password change, and the token in the system needs to be change. OD4B will not always ask you to update the password. The client in 2016 is better at this though.

The other problem is users not understanding/caring about what the sync issue is. My users report problems with OneDrive without checking the actual problem. Sometimes is because they changed password, sometimes because the file had a special character on it (they use the # a lot).

You will still have to backup the files. OD4B only does versioning for office files as well. So, if you have an HTML that you edit there will be no versions on the file (Dropbox keeps versions of all files). This might be mitigated by keeping file history on the client as well though.

It is not a perfect product, and I don’t intend to defend it, but it you already pay for it (with a license for something else) then there is no reason not to use it. Document the sync errors and how to update the password, and make sure the users read it and you will be well under way.

At the moment we have a limited user count using it, but they love it because they can access the files outside the company (and from the same place they check their email).

I also have a few stupid users that don’t understand how it works.

As for myself. I have been using OneDrive and OneDrive for Business for years. I have ALL of my document in OneDrive (I have 1.7 TB of storage) and I have access to all my computer files from my desktop (where they reside primarly) from my Surface Laptop, from my Android phone, and from my Dell Venue tablet. It is a beautiful thing.

I started using Onedrive for business to replace the department documents, and that has worked as well. I actually went as far as to set the location in the network (so nothing changed actually) and my wife (who works with me) was using the network share while I was using OD4B and I did not realized she was using the share

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