Microsoft Teams adds third party file integration

Steven Collier - thanks for the heads up.

There are several reasons for not moving entirely to the cloud.  The biggest reason is that my department is just one small piece of the whole.  Our operations and accounting department are simply not there.  Accounting especially does not have use for it.  I can certainly see the value, but convincing other departments that they need to move all of their data to the cloud when they only work in the office is very much an uphill task.  The majority of people work on many different projects within a day and they certainly would not want to sync all of that local when right now they just browse to a server location.  I understand that there are ways that it could be in the cloud and the end-user would never even know it but until our IT company says we have to do that, we won't.  Another reason is just as important and difficult.  My boss doesn't want to.  He wants to just go the server and navigate to where he has always navigated to to get the information he wants.  I work for a construction company and have plans, specs, quotes and takeoffs.  Everybody needs to have access to them, but only a few of us actually use them on the day to day.  Changing the rest of the companies workflow or network architecture for my team is simply not practical.  The only possible way would mean that my team would have a complete different network than the rest of the company and our IT company does not want to manage different systems.   Even if they did, there is another consideration consisting of some of the software we use.  Our 3D modeling program has to live local to run correctly.  Any type of dynamic cloud save (sync on demand) causes errors .  When in the office, it can run on the server without issues.  When working remote, these files have to set up to sync local.  If we did not have a local server, we would constantly be syncing large files to our C drives - which really defeats the purpose of the cloud and would be a set backwards.  Our estimating software also links to outside spreadsheets and runs on the server.  If those spreadsheets are not local (via server) then we lose that functionality.

I am all for pushing data to the cloud (although I did get severely hindered when AWS went down and the Bluebeam Cloud was unavailable - twiddling thumbs on bid day is no good) but there practical and logistical reasons that prevent it from being the all-in solution.  My solution right now has to rest on finding a way to sync my little piece of one server to the cloud so I can work from home and my boss can open the file the old way from his desktop.