Forum Discussion
Feature Request: Mounting Onedrive/Sharepoint as a network drive
It used to be posssible to mount Sharepoint as a network drive with a letter like U:\, now with Internet Explorer being out of service that's no longer possible;
Google Drive also supports this feature and it's extremely useful, why:
- If you use a lot of Excel files with Sharepoint and want to link them, it's not easy because onedrive folders are stored in user folders so the path changes with the username;
- Some programs use Project files that load other files with a full path, not relative path, so it's not compatible with Onedrive;
- Users constantly confuse the personal Onedrive folder with the Sharepoint folder, having a network drive instantly simplifies this for the user;
- As an MSP employee we often cannot sell a 365 solution because everything the company has traditionally done is with network drive letters and it's not possible to transition even simple file servers to Sharepoint without months of work.
Please add this to Onedrive, thank you!
msbru Yes you can mount SharePoint Online as a network drive. You can use scripts to do it, which are free, or you can use a commercial solution like Zee Drive to map network Drives to SharePoint Online and OneDrive
ZEE drive works fine for us. Using it for years now.
Great app with built-in functionality to prevent dataloss or duplicate over writing from various sources.
- Thank you for sharing your kind feedback and great to hear Zee Drive has been working well for you 🙂
This is not the right place to ask for product features (no one relevant at Microsoft reads posts on this community site), however you're a talking about an existing feature that is rightfully being deprecated.
I have been in organisations that have mounted SharePoint drives as network connections. Marrying two very different file storages like this causes incredible problems, including
1. Loss or corruption of data due to network file paths (which may be as long as 32K characters) being truncated to those of cloud storage ( practically less than 300 characters ). This alone should give pause to attempting this. Cloud storage sync needs to work as a lowest common denominator with all supported client platforms Windows, iOS, Linux, Android etc (true also for Dropbox, Google Drive etc..).
2. Timing out requiring constant refresh of connections.
3. Cloud-based features dependent on synchronisation with cloud do not work for individual users. Some of these are security features and protections against ransomeware etc.
Some of the issues you highlight appear to be connected with improper use of SharePoint, such as storing common files in OneDrive rather than SharePoint.
