“Add to OneDrive” 🎙 – The Intrazone podcast

GAIA CARINI: “Eventually, the goal is to fully replace the sync button, and so stay tuned for more information and timelines on that. We don’t have timelines on it right now. Again, the – the current focus is really addressing the feedback so we can really make the Add to OneDrive experience the best possible one for users across different scenarios.”

I didn’t see this podcast and post until yesterday.  From the way things have been presented by @Katy and @Gaia I’m concerned, and I align with contributor @m36five and the comments that person posted.

In the end, the user acceptability, will depend on the final implementation of how those links are surfaced in OneDrive.  Currently the two methods serve two different ways of working (scenarios) well.  There is just the problem of the conflict on occasions between trying to use the two methods for one SharePoint library.

My role at Cardiff University is Collaboration Enablement Manager within the university IT department.  At the university we have over 6000 staff members in a large variety of roles working in very different scenarios.  We have people working in some roles which are very similar to those in a commercial business, but of course we have academics, researchers and teachers.  Thus my team, in conjunction with other central teams, serves what is a microcosm of how people work digitally across the world, but certainly US, UK, EU etc.  I’ve been in the role since at least 2010 and related roles previously. 

Microsoft 365 has been shaped with some useful design principles and a key one which has been clear since 2017 is the separation of “individual” work from “group/team/community/org” work.  In between these two is ad hoc or small chat group collaboration, but that logically hangs off “individual” work and has been implemented that way in Microsoft 365 with small chat groups and standalone (non-channel) Teams meetings, when on-the-fly shared files and standalone meeting recordings are held in the OneDrives of the people sharing or clicking the meeting record button.

This division between OneDrive for the individual and SharePoint for the group/team has made sense and aligned with the old home drive and shared drive provision at many institutions. 

The sharing permissions policies for OneDrive and SharePoint in our tenancy are different.  With OneDrive you can share files with “Anyone” and the responsibility for that rests with the individual.  With SharePoint you cannot share with “Anyone” because the responsibility rests with the group.  You can invite someone as a guest to that Teams or Group space but then there is some transparency and sight of what is being shared at a group level.

There are clearly scenarios when having all the shared links in one view is the best for certain users.  My most recent example was for the director of a research centre who needed a single “dashboard” of all her file content.  The renamable shared folder links in OneDrive worked well, but at our institution she is much more the exception as staff are used to the separation.

As m36five states “This is a useful separation as we think about which files are exclusively our own and which are shared files to which we have access. Instead of this separation into a different folder [sic] strucure, 'Add to OneDrive' surfaces these synced folders in OneDrive web by mixing shared (Teams) files under "My files" (though with a slightly altered folder icon), and this doesn't provide the full separation that helps users stay organized.”  

So, if for technical reasons Microsoft doesn’t have the resource or capability to get the two methods to work in tandem then we would need some way of placing by default all the shared content links separately to the individual’s folders. 

Effectively you would be stopping having two sync locations and concentrating on one, requiring imho an extra level separating Shared Content and Individual Content under the OneDrive client icon.  Ideally Microsoft would keep that icon just for individual and ad hoc shared content from colleagues OneDrives and devise a new icon branding for Cloud files.