Forum Discussion
Paul Cunningham
Mar 09, 2017Steel Contributor
Syntax for Onedrive.admx edits - DefaultRootDir
In the Onedrive deployment guidance we're instructed to edit the Onedrive GPO template (Onedrive.admx) to insert specific values. For example, replacing {INSERT YOUR TENANT'S GUID HERE} with our ...
dustintadam
Oct 27, 2017Iron Contributor
Well, after doing some additional testing, i was able to finally get the gpo to behave the way i wanted:
I was able to create the directory C:\OneDrive via GPO, and set this as the default when OneDrive first launches.
The reason we are doing this is a little long-winded, and since I have your attention, I would love some feedback on our use case:
For 90% of circumstances, it wouldn't matter if the OneDrive folder was buried in the user's directory, however, we have a few applications in our environment, AutoCAD and Adobe InDesign as two examples, that rely on literal pathing to fetch resources. This was fine when the resources were stored on a file server and made available either via UNC or a mapped network drive, the file was always stored in the same path, and any user that needed to open them would have no issues.
Well, OneDrive introduces a challenge here because the default storage location is unique to each user, which breaks that literal pathing. From a performance perspective, these applications are not very latency forgiving, and fetching the content directly from cloud storage just isnt a viable option, and some of these applications don't support HTTP addresses or even understand web protocols.
Secondly, we have been eagerly awaiting the release of Windows 1709 and the promise of Files On Demand, our initial testing honestly has us incredibly excited, its an amazing bit of engineering, we are actually now planning on migrating close to 90% of our file server content to SharePoint Online.
However, the catch we've noticed is that Files On Demand, since it writes directly to NTFS now to track sync status in attribute form, it takes quite some time for that content to be fully represented, its fast certainly, somewhere in the order of 3500 objects per minute, but when you're connecting to a document library or several that altogether contain over a million objects, it would take several hours before FoD finally wrote all theat data to disk, even if it was just "Online Only"
our hope, and i'm almost certain im going to be breaking something by doing this, is that if we wrote that data in a common directory, we could still be able to present the content on workstations that are shared or ad-hoc, like conference rooms where you never really know who is going to log in, and already have a representation of the online document library written to a spot that the next user's onedrive client could consume it.
ideally, it would be great if there was a way to speed up this initial sync of libraries in FoD, but i'll take what i can get at this point.
if i'm just crazy just let me know, but i'd love to hear back thoughts on our approach.
Ronak Shah
Oct 27, 2017Former Employee
Hi Dustin,
Thanks for your strong interest in Files On-Demand! It's great to see so much momentum around our feature. Improving the initial sync for Files On-Demand with large libraries is one of the improvements on our backlog. Once we roll this out, you'll see the update in our release notes. No ETA as of yet, since we're still rolling out our first version of Files On-Demand with the Fall Creator's update currently.
Regarding your use case scenario: Given that your applications (CAD + Adobe) rely on absolute paths, I think your approach of a default directory that isn't user specific is best. Please do let us know if you encounter any issues with these applications interacting with Files On-Demand.
Thanks,
Ronak
Thanks for your strong interest in Files On-Demand! It's great to see so much momentum around our feature. Improving the initial sync for Files On-Demand with large libraries is one of the improvements on our backlog. Once we roll this out, you'll see the update in our release notes. No ETA as of yet, since we're still rolling out our first version of Files On-Demand with the Fall Creator's update currently.
Regarding your use case scenario: Given that your applications (CAD + Adobe) rely on absolute paths, I think your approach of a default directory that isn't user specific is best. Please do let us know if you encounter any issues with these applications interacting with Files On-Demand.
Thanks,
Ronak
- dustintadamOct 27, 2017Iron Contributor
Thats good to hear, I'm continuing our testing and i'll kick back more feedback