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?
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...
- Appreciate the response and points. It is valuable perspective, but I note that none of those, except for possibly point two promise a more efficient way of interacting with your files vs. local access?
We've had a pretty mixed experience so far with SPO, although that could be because we are only trying to use it for document storage and haven't had a reason to explore other features. But things like trying to open a document link instead of an attachment add quite a few more steps. Click on link, wait for browser to open webpage, login to O365, open the file in a browser, download the file to the desktop app, make some changes, save, try to send a link back from recent used files, remember that doesn't work for some reason in my Outlook 2016 (gives an error message every time that it cannot find the file), so browse for the file using the slow Browse Web Locations link, and finally send the file back with your changes. I feel we must be missing something since the process is just so inefficient.
