Forum Discussion
Syncing SharePoint sites with OneDrive
- Mar 10, 2019Don't focus on just the files part. Spin it as here is your Team in Microsoft Teams, if you have it, or SharePoint Team site, with news this and here are you're files, and this is how you can share them with other departments while maintaining privacy to just your department on the files etc.
This is just my opinion but I've always gone the approach depending on your org structure, is having a Public communication SharePoint site for Each departments News and "Global" file document libraries, where files that should be available to the org are, for instance, HR's comm site would have benefits documents etc. in them, where the whole org has access.
Then you have a Private Team site for each department where their own files are, if they need to share the file to just a few people as exceptions you have the Share button to use.
This is usually the approach I take, sense you usually have Global drivers with no security, and each department has a folder, and another "Private" drive where each department can only see / access their own folder, these get moved into Private Department / Team sites.
This leads more towards Team area's and less about just Files and folders.
But there is another wrench here, where if you have a repeatable type of document repository such as projects, or customers where documents are consistent across the board but separated by an entity you start to use a central single repository and use metadata, so that finding these files becomes much easier. But I'm kind of going off normal standard network driver migrations as most of the time, the use case is how I laid it out above.
So you're suggesting to map those sites as network drives which will replace their old network drives.
Which means I'll need to figure out a way to make deploy those new network drives or in turn deploy a script that connects to the share and adds it as a quick access.
Also this means losing the search index ability to index the synced metadata to help the users find files more quickly.
If you are using metadata the sync clients really don’t handle it very well. Turing off sync and forcing everything online is the way to go these days unless people just have to have offline sync capabilities then I usually try to tell them to copy files to their onedrives or use checkout and work on checked out files instead offline then check them back in.
- RahamimLMar 10, 2019Iron ContributorAre you suggesting we use the web browser instead of the file explorer? This means using 2 different platforms for working with files. Web browser for SharePoint and file explorer for OneDrive and personal files.
- Mar 10, 2019it doesn’t have to be all web. If you make use of office clients when you open items they all show up in recent lists. Also you have access to all your SharePoint locations from within the clients. Also on the web. You can get to them many ways and search from office portal home etc.
Anyway just trying to say I stay away from sync or network shares via explorer or anything resembling old school work habits at all costs.- Norman YoungMar 10, 2019MVP
Hello RahamimL,
I agree with ChrisWebbTech. Adopting modern work habits for modern tools is more desirable than maintaining the old school approach to document management.
SharePoint Maven has an excellent blog post - Solve all your SharePoint sync issues by using the new OneDrive Sync Client - that is worth reviewing and confirming settings in your tenant.
I hope this helps.
Norm