SharePoint Doc Library issues with newest OneDrive NGSC

Simon Denton

Hi Simon, glad to hear from you.

I think there are two different subjects here:

1. Correct usage of ODFB. ODFB is meant to store personal business documents, hence normally accessed only by a single person, i.e. the owner. Of course sharing temporarily ODFB documents is perfectly OK, but keeping permanently workgroup documents in ODFB is not a good practice. I think we can easily agree on this.
2. Correct usage of sync. Here things tend to be a little more complicated, because IMHO there is a strong mismatch between technical and marketing reasons. I worked as a researcher for an academic institution, and at that time my area of interest was concurrency control. Hence I know exactly how difficult is to maintain coherency of a resource which is concurrently accessed by multiple users. Now, with sync we have not only concurrent accesses to data but even local copies potentially misaligned: a nightmare from a technical standpoint! (I must admit that I am surprised that it works... ;-) ) Microsoft is doing everything that is technically possible to give to people a feature that the marketing loudly requires, but IMHO such feature simply can't work reliably all the times. In conclusion, I think that syncing locally simultaneously accessed resources is a dangerous proposition from a data integrity point of view (as all complaints in this community demonstrate everyday...) and it should be done only when it is really indispensable (coauthoring etc.) and not, for example, only because people likes more the File Explorer UI instead of the ODFB Web UI. Just my opinion, of course...