Forum Discussion
How to use SharePoint Team Site files on a day-to-day-basis
In the photo included, I was in a recent O365 training session and we were talking about breaking customer's file sets into smaller chunks i.e. Admin, Finance, HR etc, then migrating the data to Sharepoint team sites via the any of the various methods we discussed.
Once the data is migrated up into the relevant SharePoint team sites, what is your recommended method for employees to work on these files on a day-to-day basis. I've previously setup the NGSC to sync the files to each machine, but it doesn't seem right to have all (or a selection via the NGSC check boxes) that data on each user's machine.
Do you recommend that users just access all the files they want to work on in the web browser and then either edit them in the online version or elect to edit them in the desktop version, therefore totally doing away with the local (synced) versions of the files?
Or do you have other recommendations?
12 Replies
BTW, I would also add that local sync encourages users to (continue to) use folders, which as all we know is not good.
Rethinking the way of working, abandoning the concept of network share, is instead crucial to a correct use of SPO.
Web UI access to SPO libraries, opposed to syncing, promotes the correct use of metadata, which is the way to go with SPO libraries.
I whole heartedly agree. In theory.
But in reality getting those people to change their way of working to a slower browser based experience with metadata can be quite painful.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just saying it it's never as easy we make it out.
Would obviously love to be shown differently because I do think Lists/Libraries + Views with metadata is such a better method of slicing up information.
This is especially true if you are responsible for the adoption of users that were working with folders on drive-letter-mapped file shares for hundreds of years. :) Metadata is a fantastic thing, but using them exclusively in a folderless document library requires a huge mindset change for the majority of users, which can eventually undermine the success of the whole Sharepoint adoption. So this should be handled carefully in such a typical situations when you are migrating from file shares to Sharepoint, and providing some 'classic way of access' to documents is inevitable in certain cases.
Hi Jason,
I agree with the replies so far. I would say sync for large set of data in particular is risky and Salvatores point around ransomeware is important.
In my experience it can really depend on how individual users work as to how they adopt SharePoint.
- Users who access Office files and PDFs but don't send many attachments - browser based access will work well. Training users to open in the desktop clients provides full Office functionality that users will be familiar with.
- Users who use non-Office applications and attach lots of files to emails will find the browser limited.
If users are coming from a background of using a mapped network drive from a file server for storage you may come across some of these pain points.
- Adobe integration - needs to be manually set up to save to SPO
- Majority of non-office applications cannot open or save directly to/from SPO
- Outlook modern attachments can confuse users
- Saving attachments or emails from Outlook to SharePoint
- Attaching multiple files from SharePoint
- OWA - you cannot attach or save files to/from SharePoint! (only Groups or OneDrive)
- Saving and inserting attachments from SharePoint Outlook for MAC
- Cannot create folders in the save view from Office
- Navigating to different site collection from the Office 'Save As' menu - only the root site collection is shown.
To tackle many of the above issues, the open with file explorer feature or mapping a network drive can help as mentioned by Zoltan. This however, is not easy to deploy on a large scale or for multiple SharePoint document libraries without third party products. Again it also leaves you open to ransomware attacks.
Hope that's useful.
David
The problem I have with Office 365 at the moment, specifically to do with my SME clients is that Most of them fall into the latter catagory.
They're all used to working with a mapped network drive, Non-Office Line of Business (LoB) applications, sending/recieving emails with attachments to third party suppliers/clients and wanting to save them into the correct place in the complex file store.
Migrating these kind of users requires a massive change in usage and a retraining cost.
Mapped network drives Out of the box help to a point but are unstable if users forget to select "keep me signed in" and even then require refresh.
Third party products do solve a lot of these issues but for SME clients additional cost on top of their new 365 Opex is just plain painful.
While I completely agree with the above comments, sometimes it's still necessary to have 'mapped drive' style access to docs stored in Sharepoint, for example when multiple documents needs to be uploaded to other systems that support only classic browsing possibilities (mapped places) for uploading. In that case downloading the Sharepoint docs individually to a local drive and then uploading to the external system is not a convenient option.
For those cases we are using mapped network drive through webdav as described in this article.
Jason Rhodes wrote:Do you recommend that users just access all the files they want to work on in the web browser and then either edit them in the online version or elect to edit them in the desktop version, therefore totally doing away with the local (synced) versions of the files?
Yes, I recommend exactly that approach.
There are several reasons for which is better to avoid local sync of heavily shared resources.
For example, avoiding sync conflicts and avoiding ransomware attacks.
I haven't set up NGSC for SharePoint, so my advice might be outdated. However, I agree that having that much content on every machine doesn't make a ton of sense unless you have heavy travelers.
I always suggest navigating to the site to work on documents. It keeps things pretty straight forward. Few caveats.
Once on the site using the menu command Open > (appliction) to edit the document. I seen users struggle with the browser editor and am always trying to streamline the experience.
If the document is one they've been working on then using the applications "Open" menu is a great option for true Office documents.
I really try to keep to the basics, letting the right tool do the heavy lifting.
I have created "My Recently Modified Document" views and the like to help find what they are working on.
Delve is a great tool for going back to what you're working on. I am really enjoying the Win 10 app and includsion of alerts in my Win 10 Action Center.
- I train my users to work in the browser and avoid sync. With Office 2016 installed it becomes easier to work with files located in SharePoint and ODFB. So many of the other Office 365 apps are browser based that I see this becoming the main client. Users know they can open the docs in full fat Word etc if required.
