Forum Discussion
Moving from Dropbox to SharePoint - structure and external sharing questions.
Dropbox is only a cloud storage service. Office 365 is much, much more. Hence when migrating to Office 365 you can choose among many variants.
As I told before, generally speaking, you could use several Groups (each Group comes with its own site collection and its own doclib). But you could very well also use subsites or even different doclibs in the same site collection.
I personally would probably go with Groups, but it's a delicate choice and I cannot give you a more precise advice without a deeper analysis of your use case.
About the sync problem, I would not wish to need Groove to my worst enemy! It's really a horrible piece of software: if you can, stay away from it!
Is it really *necessary* for your external users to sync to their destops? Or maybe it is only a "bad" habit?
Just my two cents:
- Generally speaking, the trend is now towards modern team sites (AKA Groups), instead of classic team sites. So, you should use Groups, unless you have special reasons to prefer classic team sites.
- Generally speaking, the trend is now towards multiple site collections / Groups, instead of subsites. So, you shouldn't use subsites, unless you have special reasons to prefer subsites.
- AFAIK, external users cannot sync using NGSC.
- Speaking of Groups, you can make an external user a member of the Group, and in this case he/she has full access to the whole Group document library, or you can share individual SPO items (files and/or folders) with an external user that is not member of the Group. The choice depends from your use case.
Thanks for the info Salvatore.
So from your info it's either looks like I separate the folder structure using site collection instead of subsites. So In theory create the site collections in the sharepoint admin centre. So project folder A will be it's own site collection, team documents it's own site collection etc.
Or use the Office365 groups and have a "team" group, then a "project folder A" group, etc.
So our requirement still needs probably some external users syncing capability, am I right in thinking that external users can still use the old OneDrive for Business standalone client and sync a document libary using the url for both groups and site collections?
Dropbox is only a cloud storage service. Office 365 is much, much more. Hence when migrating to Office 365 you can choose among many variants.
As I told before, generally speaking, you could use several Groups (each Group comes with its own site collection and its own doclib). But you could very well also use subsites or even different doclibs in the same site collection.
I personally would probably go with Groups, but it's a delicate choice and I cannot give you a more precise advice without a deeper analysis of your use case.
About the sync problem, I would not wish to need Groove to my worst enemy! It's really a horrible piece of software: if you can, stay away from it!
Is it really *necessary* for your external users to sync to their destops? Or maybe it is only a "bad" habit?
I have a similar question as we are trying to figure out the best way to more closely collaborate with an affiliate and would like to have a shared document library that syncs down to everyone. Then I read something like this "Is it really *necessary* for your external users to sync to their desktops? Or maybe it is only a "bad" habit?" and I wonder if I am thinking about it in the wrong way? Personally, I try my best to never access any Office 365 applications via the web, I have a number of different accounts from two different tenants, and trying to keep things straight when I'm following links from multiple accounts everyday and trying to remember which account my default browser is for and which ones I have to use a second or third browser for is just painful. But even without those problems, the idea of trying to manage all files and folders via a super slow web interface, having to login every time you want to save something, not having that file you need when you're on a flight, etc... makes me cringe. The one time I worked in an organization that made heavy use of SharePoint the experience was really simple things just didn't get done, because there was just enough friction in the process to make users want to put it off.
Is there something I'm missing here? Are there benefits to working via the browser and not locally syncing that compensate for the significant downsides?
A couple of comments:
- Syncing is not always possible. For example, at the moment, you cannot sync with NGSC a folder shared with you from a user in another tenant.
- The web UI gives you access to many more features than the local UI, particularly for SPO doclibs, and such features are continuously updated.
- The locally synced files are exposed to local malware attacks: ransomware, in particular.
- Office 2016 C2R applications can open and save documents directly to SPO, without the need of explicit login.
- OneDrive for IOS (and for Android too, I believe) can sync locally items for offline access.
Just my two cents...
