Forum Discussion
Why my client really loves WebDAV and network locations
Hi Helios Comms. If users are finding authenticating with IE everyday a hassle they can try using Zee Drive to map network drives to SharePoint Online and OneDrive instead. Zee Drive will keep users authenticated automatically and their drives persistent. http://www.thinkscape.com/Map-Network-Drives-To-Office-365-OneDrive/.
Myles
Although from the feature-side this looks implressive, the problem with Zee Drive is the licensing. Already for only 500 users, the license costs are prohibiting: I just did the calculation and it showed me some 27.000 € per year. And the customer I am working currently for has about 100'000 users. So that is a big no-no. If the licensing cost would be something starting for under 10€ per user per year and rapidly going down when the amount of users increases, that would be reasonable. Also that there is no everlasting - reasonably priced - license which can be bought once and be used forever is a big no-no. Also there should be a "per user" license where the same user can use Zee Drive on any amount of computers (workstations and terminal servers) as long as he/she logs on with that same user account. In addition, for enterprises there should be an enterprise-wide concurrent user license (with an ACL so that only users which really needs the functionality of Zee drive needs to be licensed) which for example can be used on a terminal server farm. Of course this needs an on-prem licensing service. Think of an enterprise situation where there is a terminal server farm whicxh is used by 50'000 users but only 200 needs the functionality of Zee Drive.
Maybe you - as the author of Zee Drive can think this over 🙂
Other solutions have emerged that offer the same rich feature set but are financially more attractive. See https://directory.collab365.com/office365-sharepoint/best-document-management-tools-for-sharepoint/%20 and https://directory.collab365.com/listing/slim-companion-explorer/.
There are browser-based apps that add a button to the standard ribbon (just like "Open with Explorer") and open an Explorer window in a browser. The features are 99%+ the same as Windows Explorer plus there are additional features like search, thumbnails, metadata, preview email attachments in the browser, allow editing of non-Office files (e.g., PDF), ...
I just did the math for 500 users using Explorer, this will cost you $1000 per year.
Using browser-technology offers multiple advantages. It is easy to deploy since it requires no client-side installs, it works with modern browsers on Windows and macOS and updates are made in a single central location. Instead of using WebDAV as a protocol it uses the modern SharePoint REST API.
