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comgam's avatar
comgam
Brass Contributor
Oct 04, 2021

Onedrive sharing usage and problems

Hi

 

 

We are studying OneDrive for business with our O365 license and i have a question about sharing

 

Under Excel 365, there are no longer the legacy sharing options (or in submenus but without traceability, display of changes in progress, notifications ...), there is only the OneDrive sharing

 

So if i want to share a file on my network, a copy of this file is created at the root of my OneDrive and the link is sent to my colleagues.

 

 

My problem is the following : Now colleagues have 2 files, the one on our network drive (the original) + the one on my OneDrive.

We see the advantage of sharing, but we also see here a great source of confusion and therefore of incident for our users and IT support side if Onedrive is deployed on a large scale. There are those who will work on the OneDrive files and those who will work on the network drive file.

 

 

how did you manage this file sharing / collaboration problem if you encountered it ....?

 

 

Thank you

 

files
office 365
OneDrive for Business
Sync
  • MikeWWW's avatar
    MikeWWW
    Iron Contributor
    Oct 04, 2021
    Homing your OneDrive on an SMB network share is just going to cause enormous problems in a multi-user environment (ditto Dropbox etc) You have a conflict between 365 and a network server having different rules and no way for them to negotiate who wins.
    Versioning is going to break down with network users not participating in the 365 ecosystem. Add-ins may also break in unexpected ways.
    • comgam's avatar
      comgam
      Brass Contributor
      Oct 04, 2021

      hi

      thanks Mike but this is not what i want to do, maybe i was not clear 🙂 Of course the Onedrive folder is under the user profile on C:\ drive
      i just share a user experience on a OneDrive share usage

      I would like to discuss and see how other IT guys manage the example i described : there is nothing that prevent a user from sharing a file in O365 (see screenshot) through OneDrive and having 2 different copy, one one the network drive and one on the Onedrive user space .. so if you are on a department of 5 or 6 employees, how do you know one which file you should work, some will work on the network drive file by habit some on the file on onedrive 

       

      • MikeWWW's avatar
        MikeWWW
        Iron Contributor
        Oct 04, 2021

        You need to clarify your description of the situation.

        You have multiple versions of files that are updated independently. That was a problem even before 365 sharing. Educating users is what is needed otherwise much time is wasted dealing with out of date information, locked files and more. Have a plan to migrate users from the network drives to OneDrive/SharePoint. For a certain time you can leave the network drives available in read-only mode for reference.

        I usually find that if they are using Teams then the links to cloud storage drive adoption faster.

        Any other path is fraught with data loss and wasted IT resources.

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