Forum Discussion
Sharing OneDrive Folder or SharePoint Folder with OneDrive for Business
Yes, I have it set up now and it looks to be working. I am also looking into whether there is a reason for that OneDrive setting.
So, to recap, the reason my OneDrive and SharePoint folders were not syncing even though I was getting the "Sync this library to your device for easy access" dialog was because my browser wasn't showing me a popup that asks whether I want to open the OneDrive app on my computer or not. Once I unlinked my computer and relinked it to the OneDrive app and tried the sync again, the popup appeared and I was able to sync.
Further to that, the use of a shared OneDrive folder in this situation was not an ideal solution. The better solution was to share a folder created in a Classic SharePoint Site where I can control the access level for members.
Thank you so much to Salvatore Biscari, Deleted, jcgonzalezmartin, and Laurent Lee A Sioe for the help!
Deleted. Thank you so much for your response. Here are the details you requested.
I am working with two different Office 365 accounts here: One is called Templates which is where the shared folder is coming from and one is my own name which is where I want to share the folder to in order to test that I can share it with others. Both of these accounts are part of the organization's Office 365. Does that mean we are part of the same tenant? I'm sorry, I'm not quite familiar with that term. I'm assuming an "external user" is someone who is not part of the organization's Office 365 account. But both of these accounts are administrated by the organization's IT admin.
I tried a folder in the Template account's OneDrive for Business site and a SharePoint online document library. In both cases, when navigating to those places with my Jessica Kavanagh account I could see a sync button. When I clicked on the button I got the dialog that says "Sync this library to your device for easy access" and a "Sync now" link. When I clicked on the link the dialog box would disappear but the OneDrive app never opened. I would go into the OneDrive app and look at the OneDrive folders to sync dialog and the shared folder I was trying to sync wasn't there to check.
Having said all of the above, I just tried to do the same again right now and suddenly it does sync to my computer, though not in my usual OneDrive for Business area but it has created a whole new drive as it were (if that's the word I want, I'm not sure) and put the shared folder there. The only thing that has changed from my last try to this one is that I now have OneDrive admin privileges under my Jessica Kavanagh account. I'm not sure why that would make a difference, but it's obviously not something we can do for every user in the organization.
Just a couple of general comments:
- You should not use ODfB for permanently sharing documents to all users in your organization. ODfB should be used only for business docs pertaining to a single user and, as such, it is suitable for short-term sharing and/or for sharing with few people. Hence you should use a Group doclib instead, or a doclib in a classic Team Site.
- Every user is, by default, the Site Collection Administrator of his/her ODfB. It is not recommended to remove this privilege because doing so you can experiment all sort of malfunctioning, as you have already seen.
Just my two cents...
Salvatore Biscari Thank you for your input.
Let me loop back around to the original problem for a moment for which the OneDrive solution was suggested.
We have over twenty Word document templates as well as style templates, theme colors, and SmartArt customization. All these files usually live in the Templates folder on the user's computer and the subfolders of that folder (e.g. Templates/SmartArt Graphics). If they are not within that folder structure, but are instead simply downloaded off a group site as needed, they won't work as designed. They need to be in their respective folders so that the customization and Add-Ins appear within Word.
Currently only a few of the employees of the organization use these templates and each time new versions are released the employees download the individual files and manually place them in the respective folders as needed. It's clumsy and I have no way of knowing if the employees have completed the task correctly or not (or at all). Now I am being asked to roll out the templates across all employees in the organization. Manually installing the templates for each update is really not an option anymore.
What I want to do is use the Workgroup Templates option within Word to point to a folder with the sample subfolder structure which I can update as needed and therefore the users themselves don't need to do anything and won't even know an update has happened. However, the users are scattered throughout multiple countries, offices, and remote locales. A common network drive just does not exist.
Therefore it was suggested that a shared OneDrive folder would do the job because I could easily update it from my end but the folders would be sitting on the local drive so that even if the user travels to a remote location without internet connection the templates will still be accessable to them.
If OneDrive for Business should not be used for permanently sharing documents, then how can I provide a solution to this situation?
For each user, the OneDrive client (AKA NGSC) can sync both the ODfB doclib (which is individual, i.e. similar to a local drive) and several SPO doclibs (which are shared among multiple users, i.e. similar to a network drive).
The correct solution to your use case could be to put the templates in a folder of an SPO doclib and sync it locally for every user.
Try it and let us know.
Laurent Lee A Sioe. Thank you for your response. The problem isn't actually with the Mac computer. The Mac computer is syncing fine. It's the Windows computer I've been having problems with.
Salvatore Biscari I have had the admin privileges removed from my Jessica Kavanagh account and tried setting the sync up again with a SharePoint Document Library.
The sync worked successfully this time. Just before doing that I had actually unlinked my computer from my OneDrive app and then linked it back up again. So when I clicked the Sync button, I got the dialog I normally do which gave me the "Sync now" button and then after I clicked that button I got an additional dialog I haven't seen before from my browser (Chrome) which said "Open Microsoft OneDrive?" with the two options "Open Microsoft OneDrive" and "Don't open." There was also a check box for "Remember my choice for Microsoft OneDrive links."
So I'm wondering if at some point in the past I had been presented with that dialog box before and clicked "Don't open" for some reason and the browser remembered that as my default response. So each time I clicked the "Sync now" link the browser would effectively veto the action and never allow the sync command to get through to the app.
However, I am still concerned about the setup with SharePoint. As a member of the SharePoint group, I can actually edit the folder which is shared with me, even though I'm not the owner. I really don't want that to be the case though since having everyone being able to edit the folder where the templates are kept is going to be extremely problematic. But when I log in with my Templates account as the owner of the SharePoint group I can't see anywhere that allows me to change access to read only. Could you help me out here?