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Using OneDrive for a team of creatives – central storage rather than individual owners
Hi all, I've recently joined a new organisation as a digital design lead. My team of designers and video editors are spread across two different cities, so we need a cloud-based file storage system t...
dz1na A Teams/SharePoint approach is much more appropriate to a group of people. OneDrive is designed for a single user.
You have a choice of using the SharePoint storage built into Teams, or having a separately administered SharePoint site which is linked to your Team. You can have multiple Teams linked to external SharePoints.
SharePoint folders (document libraries) may be synced to your local computer just like OneDrive folders. You also get extra flexibility to split up files into different document libraries with different permission sets, including say the ability to make some files read-only to specific audiences.
What do you mean by "massive files"? SharePoint/OneDrive supports files up to 100GB but the suitability depends on how you work with those files.
dz1na SharePoint sync works through the OneDrive sync client, so you shouldn't see any performance difference, other things being equal. Performance is going to be largely due to your internet speeds and local client machine capability.
"in an ideal world I would have my team working directly from the files stored on OneDrive, via local syncing. Is this suitable? Or would they need to work locally and then upload? Speed is critical – we cannot have design or video files lagging while working on them. "
Again, having multiple people working from a single OneDrive account is NOT desirable for all sorts of administrative reasons. Working from local sync files should be fine if your network performance is adequate, but it will depend a bit on the nature of the files you're working with. It's up to you to test that this will meet your requirements.
Mike Williams Sorry I may have used the wrong terminology – I meant if we were to use your suggested SharePoint solution, but synced via the OneDrive desktop client.
I definitely want multiple people working from one shared location, this is big for us as we are trying to encourage collaboration and consistency, and tidy up a lot of chaos caused by individual people sharing individual folders without any clear view of the entire team's work. If Microsoft can't offer that solution I will need to look at alternatives; that's why I'm asking these questions.
Types of files we will be using: Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and other creative software files, as well as your typical Word docs, spreadsheets etc. The design files are typically collected into a folder containing multiple versions of the working file (v1, v2 etc), any assets linked into the working file (JPGs, MP4s etc – often numerous), and exported final files (high-res PDFs or MP4s. Generally a user would need the entire folder, which might be several GB. I also have roughly a TB of archived files that currently exist on hard drives and need to be migrated to the cloud to make them accessible across locations.
dz1na Use SharePoint/Teams as first suggested. The platform has been evolving for twenty years and has many powerful features. You are not going to learn 1% of it from reading forum posts. There is a wealth of published and free training material for you to dive into.
Any files saved into OneDrive or SharePoint are automatically versioned without you having to put version information into the file names. The volume of files you mention is not that great ( I sync much more than that from my home computer) but no one can diagnose the capability of your network or your devices. That's up to you.
Please note that Adobe's integration with other cloud platforms is "idiosyncratic".Mike Williams hmm well thanks for the SharePoint suggestion, as to your comment about getting off forums and reading training material, that was a little condescending but I'll just say "no thank you". I'll go back to my organisation with this idea and see how we get on.
Just to chime in on this, Mike Williams has provided the correct course of action as far as Microsoft Technology goes. If you're using Creative Cloud, than that can be worked into Teams as well in a heap of creative and useful ways.
If you're looking at other options, Adobe Creative Cloud (and the others I believe) do have cloud storage attached to them. Have you looked into their shared library facility?
